Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Texas Losing the War Against Feral Hogs

Yeah....sure. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of the money hunting and fishing brings to small local economies. It's a great thing. From food, beer, ice, gas, butchers, guides and waitresses all benefit. How much will the local economy benefit from 26 good dudes descending upon Crystal Texas? How much are out of state licenses and tags? How much is a lease? How much corn gets involuntarily donated to feral pigs? It all adds up.



2016 Campfire hog hunt 3/9/16-3/13/16(Wed-Sun)
Arrive Wed. Afternoon hunt Thurs.-Sat. and depart Sunday a.m.
All meals and lodging, 3 hogs on 14,000 acre ranch(5000 high fence 9000 low)
45 blinds so no doubling up unless you choose to.
3 to a room each room has its own bathroom with shower
Cost for every thing(excluding license,butchering and tips) is $750.00
We will be hunting near Crystal City TX once again
There WILL be hogs to shoot!
We will have a max of 26 hunters,and again previous attendees will have 1st dibs.

Here is a link to the ranch

the depression, i would guess.

Idaho's elk population recovered from the depression just in time for the feds to turn the wolves loose on them.

The boys in Texas are welcome to all the wolves they want to trap and transport.

That's not a drop in the bucket compared to deer hunting by locals in that same area.

There just aren't many large scale hog hunting operations around. Certainly not enough to have much impact on the economy.

Screw worms were the limiting factor. Screw worm eradication helped the livestock, deer, and unfortunately the pigs.

Interesting how people who are NOT landowners always want free access to land? If you folks think hogs are such "pests", why would you even want to hunt them? I have hogs on my property, much prefer them to trespassers! Even here in Texas, they kinda frown on us shooting strangers we catch on our property, but not so the hogs!

Also, the ones who spout off the most nonsense about the hogs situation, naturally, are the ones who know the least about it.

Since Flave doesn't seem to be around, I'll say it - GFY!

Lots ya'll will never know about the hod situation down here, or a lot of other things.

That's exactly the question I'm asking Mike. WTF would anyone pay to hunt a feral and invasive species is beyond me.

The "you owe me something" non-land owners are easy to spot and fun to laugh at. They don't have a clue.

Excellent post.

Hogs were never "wiped out". At least not here. During the great depression, the woods were full of hogs and were considered somebody's property.

Hogs were never "wiped out". At least not here. During the great depression, the woods were full of hogs and were considered somebody's property. [/quote]

I was born and raised on the Concho river just east of San Angelo, Texas. This part of west Texas is covered up in WT deer and has been since before I was born.
My father on the other hand never saw a WT deer until he was 15 years old and that was near Houston. According to him we have always had hogs along the river bottoms but the deer only showed up after several truckloads were brought in from south Texas to a big ranch west of town in the early 1950's.

Same here. My parents and their siblings were dirt poor and raised in the red lands of East Texas, living off the land. I'll never forget my uncle (who would be 100) telling me that he was 18 before he ever saw a live deer.

Then why so much bitching about hog problems? miles

My granddad was the same. He was born and raised in Llano County, and told me when he was a kid, there were no deer there.

Someone must have put a bunch of automatic deer feeders out every few steps in the 50's and 60's for the population to have grown to what it is in that county now...

Jeffbird hit on a factor that is seldom recognized as the epic event it was for wildlife and livestock survival.

Good job, Jeff.

On that note, it is estimated that the whitetail population of the entire United States was 250,000 in 1900.

I'm always the first to laugh at an Aggie joke but it was some folks at Texas A&M that came up with the method to eradicate the screw worm. It's development completely changed the game for livestock and wildlife in the south!

Some fairly recent estimates of a few states on deer populations.



Musta been all those deer feeders...

My dad tells me that when he was a kid in the 50s that if someone saw a deer track they went to town and told about it as a big deal.

As for deer feeders, they have nothing to do with deer numbers as that deer only breed once a year and they provide little in the way of nutrition for them. On our place, the deer won't eat corn. They prefer other stuff. All you get are pictures of coons and hogs on the corn.

I was surprised, when reading "Journal of a Trapper, that Osbourne Russel who was born around 1800 and lived in Maine had never fired a rifle until he went West around 1830.

Apparently game was not nearly as plentiful by that time as I had always imagined.

In 1960, when I left for the Service, I would have to travel 20 miles to find deer. When I came home in 1964, they were all over this country.

There had always been wild hogs in the Squaw Mountain area in Northern Jack County but they had never migrated west of HWY 281 into Young County.

In the 'seventies, a couple of brothers who owned a ranch in the Squaw Mountain are rigged up a trailer with a trap door and caught hogs. Leasing pastures for deer hunting was becoming common by then and hunters would pay the boys to bring a trailer load to a pasture they had leased. They would feed them corn and water them in the trailer for a few days, then release them with a corn feeder placed where the trailer had been.

I know of three pastures, myself, here in North Young County where this was done.

In a very few years, hogs were plentiful all the way from Squaw Mountain to Jean. They seem to set up boundaries and stay in those boundaries for a long time. I saw the same thing in Cottle County, out under the Caprock. They stayed in pockets, even though the country adjacent to them was just like the area where they were established. Then they would suddenly appear miles away.

Just like W T deer, they use the rivers and large creeks as migration routes when they do spread out.

One of my long time M D hunting partners has a flying service in rice country and has a helicopter used strictly for facilitating rice "breeding" and killing hogs, since they are death on a rice field.

They do little damage to range land, wheat, or cotton, but play hell with a hay field.

Watching you tough guys "drive" hogs around here would be worth BIG money.