We were blind hunting over the weekend in Jack County. My buddy shot a hog and texted me that he put him down to the right of his blinds position. Here are some photos taken by the game cam




So pretty standard hunt so far ....

Well a short while later he texts “my pig got up and fell down again and then got up and staggered off into the woods”.




He is a member on the forum so hopefully he sees this post and will fill you in on the rest of the story - spoiler alert - he and the pig would meet again real soon and things got interesting !

Anybody else have any stories of zombie hogs ???

He was shooting 6.5 Grendel 120 grain SST at under 100 yards , the hog took the shot didn’t squeal or move or thrash about - it was upright momentarily after being hit and then fell on its side (usually this means Dead) and then got up and walked off

Knowing the point of aim on the hog would go a long ways towards determining what happened.

"Head Shots" are notorious for missing the mark (brain pan, occipital joint, etc).

Neck shots or high shoulder shots (normally a good bet) if hit too 'high' can connect with one of the dorsal projections of the spine. Knocks the pig out cold....only to recover later. A good CNS hit (Central Nervous System) will usually result in wild, uncontrolled kicking and thrashing for a short while. If your pig goes straight down, never squeals and never kicks....stay on it and be ready for a follow up shot.

When approaching a downed pig if the eyes are closed (not open, fixed and unresponsive) beware! Don't ask me how I know.

Yup I have a few stories of dead but not dead yet hogs. The one that bothers me the most is probably the biggest one I have ever seen in my life. I saw him probably close to a mile away and over the course of an hour or so he closed the distance to about 400 yards. I felt pretty comfortable with the shot so I squeezed off a round from the 300RUM and he crumpled in his tracks. I bolted another round into the chamber and got back on him in case he got up. He gave a few kicks while laying on the ground and then laid motionless for about 2-3 minutes or so then I lowered the rifle and started packing up my stuff. Few minutes later he started kicking again then flopped and kicked his way into the brush. I figured he would still be an easy recovery though. I got to where he was just before dark but still dark enough to need a light and was able to catch up to him in some super dense brush and he was up on all 4's growling and grunting at me. Due to the loss of daylight I decided to not go after a Boar that was easily twice the size of me in the dark so I backed out and picked up the trail the next morning but never recovered him. I have killed some giants over the years but that one was probably in a class all by himself.

Right on

Looking at the time stamps on the pics, the hog was upright (though not fully upright by the 2nd time stamp after getting shot) nearly two minutes. That is a long time! Hogs rarely die upright. I have seen it done, but more much more often than not, and upright hog is a live hog. In over 1400 hogs, I have had 3 die upright and one of those was held upright by a telephone pole. The other two were wounded and went prone to rest and apparently bled out upright, but they were there for a good while. He shot the hog and it went to its belly. If it doesn't flop over on its side, immediately, it is getting shot again.

Looking at the photos more closely, it would appear to be a low neck/jaw shot, at least by the wound on the left side of the hog. Maybe somebody else has apps for getting up close, but that it what it looks like to me. The hunter probably did not know the POI at the time. However, with the luxury of time being able to look at the image to assess the shot, that would not be a shot that would apt to be lethal or immediately lethal. The hog may have been stunned by the shot and then finally went unconscious before recovering enough to get up.

Once it rolled to the side like that, I would have assumed it was done as well, maybe just having taken a little long to bleed out.

The OP said the how was down right next to the blind's position. I wonder if maybe the shot was lower than intended because the range was much shorter than the zero distance?

Well the rest of the story.......

After the Zombie pig started to struggle to get up like a drunken sailor " I said to my brother...Don't you think I need to finish him off?" He said NO WAY that Pig is getting up he is dead..."Look he fell down and is on his side again he is dead bro" I know he did not want me shoot since he had not seen anything and we did not want to scare off any prey that might walk in to the area. Well I agreed and the next time I look I saw what you guys see in that last picture. "No Hog and a blood spot." Well we figure he could not have gone far and I have a thermal handheld so we will be able to find him so we stayed in the blind. Well 3 hours past and we decided to call it a night and head over to where we thought the hog would be and I saw him in the briar and woods patch about 25 yards in the woods.

So me and brother find a path to get thru the thick briers and try to get to the hog who was laying on his side dead we thought. So we get about 5 yards away from the hog and I pull out my trusty green flashlight in the total darkness and shine my light on the hog and all the sudden he turns his head to look at me and my brother with a pissed off grin and some nice cutters showing. All we had on us was our thermal scoped AR 10 and AR15 no pistols in our possession. So I tell my brother " Finish him off" Well he shots the pig in the underside chest area with a 308 slug. The hog has to be dead we think at this point and we start to walk close up about 3 feet away since we now see no movements.

As the adrenalin starts to go up in both of us from this encounter in the blackness of the night and we hear a loud squeal from this "BLACK ZOMBIE". The ZOMBIE gets up on his feet and turns with a menacing look and teeth showing and starts to head towards us and we cannot back out since behind us is thick torcherous briar patch. Well once this happens my brother starts firing his 308 blindly in the direction of the ZOMBIE and we cannot tell if he is still coming at us since we cannot see him. I then pull up my rifle to my shoulder and with great fear and heart pumping I see that this beast is on the ground with his legs nuw under him looking right at us still his eyes wide open and saying to himself " I am going to haunt you for the rest of your life you animals!!! At that point I am at best 7 yards away and aim high since I was so close and pull my trigger on the 6.5 grendel and hope for the kill shot. The pig rolls back over on his side and is finally dead and both of us are out of breath with the fear of god in us and think maybe pistols is a good idea when you go tramping in the deep woods and blackness to find supposedly dead hogs. Shows you that they have strong will to live and are a tough hombre to deal with even with three or four powerful rifle shots in them.

I was blind hunting with a buddy and he shot a pig right in the ear with an AR .223. The pig went straight down and he got out to go put the pig on the Ranger. As he approached the pig stood up. My buddy had a pistol on him and put 3 rounds in his head.

I nearly pi**ed myself laughing as his reaction was priceless. He jumped when the pig stood up and got three rounds off before his feet hit the ground.

Another time I was blind hunting on opening morning waiting for enough light to take a shot on a target buck. A group of pigs came in and scared him off so I shot the biggest one I could see. When there was finally good light I could see two trails of blood going into the woods. It was a heart shot and she was squirting blood (well like a pig). I followed the trail and once I got into the woods it looked like a murder scene. I was paying attention to the blood and not what was around me when I heard teeth chomping and growling. One of the other pigs followed her and was laying in the trail. I was about 5 feet away from it at this point and only had a .270 with me. Like my friend in the previous story I jumped and fired before my feet hit the ground. I was just firing in a general direction so it was a very lucky head shot. I called another lease member over to check it out and he couldn't believe the carnage. Took a while for my heart rate to slow down.

seen it happen too often - those things are amazing. Usually what happens is I take the first one in a group, he goes down, I swing on others to try and get them on the run, and then when I come back to him he is gone. Other times I've had some lay there motionless for 30 minutes then get up and wobble off into the woods.