I have never hunted hogs. Other then 3 domestic ones, I have never shot a hog. (Warthogs excluded)
But I see it as just one more land-management issue that farmers and ranchers need to address. Those that want to treat them as a cash crop can do so with 100% justification. It's their land!
But those that had an actual problem with over populations of hogs are foolish to try to extract money from those that would help resolve the problem. Greed is a common problem with people everywhere and part of human nature. Wisdom is that power in someones character to know when to rein in their greed so the overall future can be improved. Like sewing seed. You buy seed and toss it around in hopes to have a larger crop later.
Demanding money from someone who would help you is the mark of a fool. But fools can own land, and if they do they have an absolute right to be a fool on their own land.
Only someone below the level of a fool will pay him. And there are some "sub-fools" who will in this world.
I remember years ago driving across a large open area of Nevada desert when I came upon a man in a truck with 2 flat tires. One on the ground and the spare. He was VERY thankful when I aborted my day's plan and helped him remove the flat from the wheel and also load up his spare and drove him to Fallon Nevada to get both flats fixed, and then drove him back to the truck out in the desert.
Now see if you can guess what I would have done if he had told me when I stopped that he would love it if I'd help him, but he wanted me to pay him $300 dollars first before he'd let me help him. (The easy answer to that question is............nothing. I'd have smiled and told him to have a nice day, and to wait for someone more foolish them himself to show up.)
If a land owner is actually having a problem they will be grateful for help..... OR they are simply not honest, and they are saying they have a problem but it's just a lie. They have no real problem at all.
For those that are allowing the hogs to infest their land to sell the hunts, more power to them.
But there are many that actually want the hogs removed and such a person WILL NOT ask money for the help ----- anymore then they would ask you to pay them to fix their tire. I know one land owner in Oklahoma, one in Louisiana and one in Texas that have told me I can come and shoot hogs ANY time and with no limits and no charge at all. The one in Louisiana even says I can stay in his guest house for free and he'll bay all the food too, but I MUST kill a lot of hogs if I come. See........that man wants the hogs killed off.
The “Why should I pay? I’d be doing the farmer/rancher a BIG favor” posts on hog hunting threads are always some of the funniest stuff on the internet. They’re always written by someone who hasn’t hunted in Texas and/or isn’t a landowner and/or they have never sat down and talked to one.
I used to hunt a 1200 acre rice farm in south Texas. I was friends with the owner and he knew he could trust me to shut gates and not endanger myself or his cattle. I had permission to do anything I wanted there and hunt whenever I wanted. The hunting was fantastic but the conditions were miserable due to heat, humidity and mosquitoes outside of January and February.
He and his tenant farmer split their profits and hog damage to their fields cost the about $60,000 a year so they had motivation to allow hunting. A professional trapper also trapped the place 365 days a year, and several other hunters occasionally killed hogs there.
The trapper captured over 500 hogs a year in big metal cage traps and sold them to a processing plant. The other hunters might have killed a 2-3 dozen combined. I drove down and hunted 2-3 times a month on overnight trips for a year. I killed about 50 hogs, not bad for a guy shooting an unsupressed bolt rifle without night vision or FLIR.
You know what good removing and killing all of those hogs did? Basically nothing. The farm was surrounded on all sides by incredibly dense brush. Hogs continued to pour out of the brush at night and raid their fields, especially when the rice was in the “doughy stage” of the head development - that’s one of their favorite meals.
The only thing that will cause a real decline in the hog population here is a swine disease. Trapping and poisoning are MUCH more effective than hunting but even they can’t keep up.
So, just for the sake of argument, let’s say you drive down from Whiningcunt, Wyoming, and you really are a good hunter. You also can shoot well and you don’t mind stepping around water moccasins and don’t care about clouds of mosquitoes.
The land owner doesn’t know this, so he has to take time out of his schedule to show you the place and guide you, or ask one of this workers to guide you and also to suspend all work in the area you’ll be hunting.
You bring a scoped deer rifle and are sitting at the edge of a clearing when 30 hogs walk out to feed. You take dead aim and kill one at 100 yards. Now there are 29 hogs making a beeline for the treeline at top speed, but you're a stud shooter and have no problem dropping two more on the run in the 30 yards they have to cover before the rest disappear into the brush. Congratulations. Those three hogs removed have done, well, nothing for the rancher. They’re a drop in the bucket. Meanwhile you were a potential snake bite victim and lawsuit waiting to happen.
I doubt it’s due, but we’ll give you more credit: you show up for the hunt with a suppressed AR with a great thermal scope. You invested in snake boots and aren’t phased by seeing a couple dozen water moccasins in your path in one night and the rancher has grown to trust you. You hunt hard for three days and nights and kill 50 hogs. Again, what does that change? Nada - not enough to move the needle in the slightest.
The truth is an unproven hunter is an enormous liability to a landowner, with way more potential lawsuit downside than upside. That said, if landowners know you’re a good hunter, a lot of folks will let you shoot all of the hogs you want. Heck, a lot of folks need does and management bucks culled too. I have a friend with a place in south Texas who has to cull 120 does a year.
The only places that sell hog hunts that I know of want to sell them to groups of hunters so they can make enough money to cover the expenses and make a bit of profit.
