Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The War Against Feral Hogs

Son, its just a fact tax dollars spent on hogs is minimal.

Once again proving that arrogance and stupidity... LOL

This article just came out today. https://fortune.com/2022/12/02/fera...-eradicate-100-million-2-billion-damage/

And that's just the federal money spent.


So despite your enthusiastic bleeding heart approach to feral hogs, you continue to lie about the facts. But, it's what you do. It's what you've always done.

How about you tell us what county you live in, and I can gather you some numbers there locally. I doubt you've ever set foot in Texas, let alone lived there.

Had one 8ft from my front door this morning, planted winter Rye, their tearin' it up.

From the article in the OP:


Research also continues on ways to poison feral hogs without killing other animals, said Michael Marlow, assistant manager of the USDA program. The poison, sodium nitrite, is a preservative in bacon but keeps the blood of live pigs from carrying oxygen.

Trials this coming winter and spring will test whether birds can be kept away from dropped bait by using a less crumbly formulation, along with grates to keep crumbs out of reach and air-powered “scarymen” like air dancers used for store advertising, Marlow said.

But for now, two major control methods are aerial shooting and remote-controlled traps that send cellphone pictures when a hog sounder is inside.

Some states have legalized night hunting for feral swine. Derek Chisum, who grows peanuts, cotton and wheat in Hydro, Oklahoma, figures he has killed 120 to 150 a year since Oklahoma did so three years ago.

Since 2014, Idaho, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Maine, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Washington, Wisconsin and Vermont have killed their small populations of feral pigs, though the program is still keeping a wary eye out in the last six states.

The worst-hit states — California, Oklahoma, Texas and Florida, where a runway collision with a pair of wild pigs totaled an F-16 fighter jet in 1988 — are still at the program's highest level, with more than 750,000 hogs. Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina put their populations at 100,000 to 750,000, though Hawaii has moved a level down.

The Texas population overall has been “fairly stable” at roughly 3 million since 2011, said Mike Bodenchuk, state director for USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS.

But statewide reduction, let alone eradication, is likely to be a long slog with tools and money available now, he said in a telephone interview.

That means killing a lot of swine, though a widely repeated figure -- that hogs are so prolific that 70% of those in a given area must be killed each year to keep numbers stable -- just isn’t right, said Kim Pepin, a research biologist at USDA’s National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colorado.

I caught this bunch some years ago, mama pig was outside the pen. Of the 13 little piggies, 8 were females, plus the bigger pigs were female too. In a year, all the females could have little one of their own.
We caught 31 that weekend

That's an awful lot of pork to contend with. Do you just dig a big hole and bury them?

I have seen reports from guys who said wild pork doesn't taste good. I guess it depends on what they eat.
The best meat I ever ate is the ham from a central Georgia wild hog, cooked for 10 hours on the smoker with pecan wood.

A lot of guys say the same about antelope. It's how you care for the meat. A properly cared for antelope is very good eating. We don't have wild hogs here but I'm betting it's the same deal.

Millions, with an “M”. Billions and trillions is chump change now days son !

I've killed some very rank boars. Even younger ones... You can smell them before you walk up to them.

One was so bad I had to throw the gloves away I used to handle him, then pressure wash my UTV I loaded him in. It was bad. Real bad.

No way would I have been able to process, cook and eat those.

Sex and age too. A mature boar is pretty stinky.

Surprisingly, the rankest boar I ever saw was a young boar. Like a year old. Breeding age, but nasty was off the charts.

I haven't been around them all that much, but at the ranch I used to hunt on they had too many hogs so they wanted us to shoot them on sight.

The big boars were dragged to a spot where the coyotes would get 'em. They'd be mostly gone the next morning.

Hunting wild hogs was the catalyst that turned me against pork. My neighboring landowner and I killed a bunch over a long period of time over a rotting cow carcass. The hogs ate guts, the meat, then the hide and bones. After that they were digging the insects and worms that always gather on a dead animal. They eat dead fish and whatever they find. Hogs and alligators will eat things a buzzard won't eat after it gets too spoiled. Moses was right.

I like the 100# or so size for eating.

Taste good.

Mixed them with deer for smoke sausage also..


Hunted with old dude that would keep all sizes. Even big boars.

He said to key to good meat, was to kill them grave yard dead ( head shot ). Don’t give them a chance to bristle up.


You’d be surprised how much of a hog is hide and fat…..
skin one and it’s small when you are done.

I should have posted that as a question rather than a comment. From later posts, I gather that hormones can make older hogs a bit 'gamey'.

Most of the time they clean up the mess real good. That's what we depend on because there's no way we could clean and eat near the number of hogs we kill, so we drag them to a designated place and leave them. Buzzards and coyotes have a free meal.

Some hogs, the buzzards and coyotes won't touch though. Not sure why, but they leave them. I shot this boar in the video below, then staked out his carcass to shoot coyotes off of, and nothing would touch him. He finally decomposed away after a long time.

I like them when they are so small they fry up like chicken leg quarters

Wolves. You guys need wolves. And big cats. And Griz.

Hmong maybe too.

I was going to try pig hunting in CA one time, and contacted several land owners.

Apparently they didn't have that big a pig problem because every one of them wanted a trespass fee.

I ain't paying to help out with someone else's problem.

Bad enough that I would likely have had to buy a license (never got that far) in a state that diverted sheep guzzler money to promote mt lions numbers. Too dumb to realize more guzzlers mean more wildlife, including lions.