Originally Posted by FLNative
I've been hunting and eating them since I was a kid in FL and south GA. Mostly gonna echo what most of the other guys have said. The smaller ones are usually excellent eating. We don't hunt them with dogs, so they never get all jacked up with adrenalin, etc. We hunt them the same way we do deer; stands or quiet stalk/still hunts.

My wife would rather eat wild pork from a 60-110 lb hog than venison. I wouldn't go that far, myself, but they are better than grocery store pork. Lot more flavor, usually very little fat.

If you're looking for a mount, shoot a big one and make the meat into sausage. If you're looking for a decent amount of roasts, chops and and such for the smoker or bbq pit, shoot one between 85 and 120 lbs. Certainly not an absolute, but a general rule of thumb if you're meat hunting: never shoot the biggest one in a group. Shoot one of the mid-size ones.

Lastly, if you shoot one and it absolutely reeks when you walk up to it, it won't be much good for anything but sausage, if even that. That's more common with big ones, and I don't bother shooting the biggest ones unless they need culling. With smaller hogs, I've only had that happen a few times and I've shot a LOT of hogs.

Odds are, you'll very much enjoy the meat if you get one in that 85-120 range. cool



I'll never waste an ounce of effort on a pig that smells when you walk up to it.

We tried that a time or two even after aging for a week on ice.

Nope, not worth the time and effort, it will smell when you cook it and you'll never get that smell off your tongue. Even brined and smoked like hams when you cook it, its BAD>..

Caveat to say I likely have only killed a couple hundred wild ones.


We can keep Larry Root and all his idiotic blabber and user names on here, but we can't get Ralph back..... Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over....