Long before they became a problem, feral hogs were mostly found in the coastal counties of south Texas. When populations started to get dense, hog cholera would rip through the populations and knock them back to practically nothing. I don't know exactly when hogs that were resistant to hog cholera entered the population, but it was after I left Texas at the end of 1975.
Back then, it was unusual for hogs to grow large enough to attract attention. I shot a few for the Mexican families on the ranches were I was doing research. The only 300+ pound hog that I have ever seen was on the Welder Wildlife Refuge near Sinton. He was pretty famous and most of the wildlife students were competing to see who could "collect" him.
My partner Charles DeYoung and I saw him rooting by a dirt tank late one evening as we were headed in, right after sundown. I had my rifle in the truck with us, so we slipped up through a mesquite thicket and I killed him with one shot to the head. It was a real chore to get him loaded in the back of the old Dodge pickup that I drove in those days.
We took him to the Necropsy Lab where we weighed and measured him, and took some tissue samples for the vet students, and samples of stomach contents for a fellow grad student who was studying their food habits over on the Aransas Refuge. Hanging from a gambrel with his nose touching the floor, his rump was a over six feet in the air. He weighed 356 lbs.
We butchered him and the meat pretty much took up all the spare room in the freezer in the student dormitory. It provided all of us poor grad students with free meat for quite a while.
