Why I like hog hunting

It's fun, and good practice for whitetail hunting. I used to just ride around and kill them when I saw them or shoot them as they presented themselves while I was deer or varmint hunting. This year we set up a dedicated hog feeder and stand. The stand is a 4' x 4' ground blind 180 yards from the feeder about 30' elevated. With the right wind it's money. If you park a Ranger 200 yards from the stand and walk in, you're about 400 yards from the feeder in case they are there. You have a concealed view of the feeder area about 300 yards out. The stand is situated so that it provides cover as you approach. The interior is black, so when you're sitting in it, you're concealed. This feeder spins one cycle per day at 5 PM.

Once I got my buck, I transitioned my whitetail set up for hogs. We pushed my feeder to the edge of my pen so that it slings corn outside of the panels. My stand here is 125 yards, elevated about 50'.

Hunting hogs like this keeps me in the field, thinking about the wind, the patterns of what I'm after, engaged in what I'm after and a lot of time behind my scope. I've learned more about bullets, shot placement, trigger pull and staying on the gun than I ever would have just shooting one or two deer per year. I read from some about how hard it is to kill hogs. IMO, it's not once you learn to have enough gun, the right bullet and shot placement. I've killed 10 or so hogs over the last month and all but one was DRT, and these were big boars, pic's shown below. I've hunted them all kinds of different ways. Sneaking up on them in the dark with a thermal and shooting them in the side of the head at 10-20 yards had to be the most fun, but hunting them the way I have this year has helped me keep on top of how I hunt and shoot deer.

Great post and makes a lot of sense. I'm just getting into hog hunting. I like the idea that I can do it all year long and whenever I want. Two of my real good friends have been going nighttime hunting for the last year or so. They would invite me to tag along all the time so finally decided to go and after the first night I was hooked. Now I'm setting up a dedicated hog rifle and just purchased a DNV optic for it.

Do you deer hunt?

Yes I do. Usually only get to go only a few times but I'm always at the property working or just hanging out.

Besides being fun...year around hog hunting helps maintain shooting skills.

What rifle and caliber do you deer hunt with?

LMT 308 MWS.

I love hog hunting for lots of reasons, including what the OP shared. I'm lucky enough that my property borders corps land that allows bow hunting for pigs. I get to bow hunt year round! Also, not to derail the thread, but our pigs taste delicious, so I get to keep the freezer stalked with pecan-fed pork as well. Other than the damage they do to the hay fields, there aren't many cons.

Great post, my sentiments exactly. I like your comments about using enough gun and shot placement. We've had several hunters invited to hunt hogs at our place who bring their magical AR-15 in 223 Rem and end up wounding hogs never to be found. I can't recall ever recovering a single hog shot with a 223 except one that was brain shot. I think they feel they can just unload a mag into a hog and don't realize how quick a hog really is.

This 100%. A new hunter has no idea how fast they are!! I watched some new hunters one day try and walk up on some, they were long gone before they got guns up. The look on their face....

I would argue the issue is bullet placement more than caliber. Body shots with any caliber are bad news if you want to recover the pig. If you want DRT, then CNS shots are the only reliable option. A good lung shot on a deer is most likely a gutshot on a hog, and newb hog hunters are very likely to make that mistake.

Agree that bullet placement is very important. So too...is having caliber/cartridge adequate to reliably dispatch a hog under most conditions.

For 'new' hog hunters....I would submit it is 'best' to wait for broadside shots and then place that shot in one of the two areas depicted below.



Either shot (with adequate cartridge/bullet construction) will anchor a hog more times than not....and gives you the greatest margin for 'error'.

For 'sub calibers' you can move up and forward to the juncture of the skull and neck vertebrae (Occipital Joint) and achieve the same CNS result.

Unless there is no other shot presented....I advise folks to avoid the 'head shot' (brain pan). It is a small (and often moving) target and the same DRT result can be had with a neck shot or high shoulder shot that breaks the upper spine.

For me it's the mark nearest the ear everytime. It's bigger than you may realize, isn't moving as much as the head and just works so well it's hard to not put the bullet there. These fools that show up with a 5.56 just to empty a mag are not going to be recovering near as many hogs (if any) as someone that brings enough gun and makes that first shot a purposeful one. I use my whitetail set up, a .308. I did have to bust the cherry on my 7 mm rem. mag on one or two this year.

I think I met one of these guys, he told me on hogs with his "5 6, double tap every pull" as he demonstrated how he quickly pulled the trigger twice. I told him, "So you squeeze the trigger improperly twice, rather than just once. Nice".

That’s some cutters.

Man - y'all have some wild-looking hogs in TX. Here in GA, most of our wild hogs look like they just slipped out of Farmer Bob's barn (which they probably did).

Hogs were never commercially raised in the Texas Panhandle to my knowledge. The genetic we have has been in the wild a couple of hundred years as far as I know. Look at this one I shot:

miss 🐗 hog hunting.
It never got to cold ta go.

Hog hunting is the perfect pill for youngsters and others who suffer from buck fever.

Wow! We have them red, black, spotted, but not a lot of ridgebacks or big tusks. That thing looks like it came out of a gladiator colosseum.

Bullet placement, bullet selection and then caliber!!! To drop hogs DRT reliably a bullet that loses 30-50% of it's original weight placed in the neck will get the job done 100% of the time. I used to be a bonded/solid copper 100% weight retention believer for all hunting, now I will only use these bullets on large game and place them on the front shoulder.

Counting the two I killed last night I've killed 370 hogs YTD with a 300 HAM'R shooting 110-150gr bullets. You don't need a large caliber to kill hogs if you choose the right bullet and place it in the center of the neck, preferably with the hog quartering to you so you get spine and lungs.

Amen to that. My mantra for a while now has been "what bullet, at what impact speed, and where it travels through the animal are ALL that matters...headstamps be damned!" Whether or not an exit is accomplished might be another consideration but that depends on what you're shooting at, when you're hunting, and sometimes where you're hunting and what you prefer based on those considerations.

For another thought or perspective...Do I like to shoot (not hunt) hogs? Absolutely. It is fun, I'll admit. And it's also nice to put an occasional one in the freezer.

However, while I also recognize the benefits the OP mentioned, I wish I never had to pull a trigger on a hog, or ever even think about them. I am squarely anti-hog and wish they were wiped from the landscape. They don't belong here, and have destroyed a lot of ecology and economy. I wonder what they've done to the quail and turkey populations? Snakes? How many fields destroyed and farmers in financial strife?

It's hard to quantify all the factors. I know this, hog hunting has been a benefit to hunting related sales. Guns, ammo, optics, and hunting opportunities for those that have none otherwise, gotta be huge $ for the industry.

Blithering idiots trapping, transporting, and releasing them is what got us into this mess. They wanted that short-term "benefit."

Certainly cannot deny that... I agree, hard to quantify. But I do have a hard time seeing hog hunting-connected sales offsetting the damage they cause (in the hundreds of millions, if not billions every year). Heck, you don't even need a Texas hunting license to hunt them anymore.

Why I like hog hunting:
1. You can go any time you want.
2. They are sneaky little suckers and smarter than you think.
3. Love being outdoors.
4. There are usually more than one at a time. (Last kill I got was a lone boar hah)
5. If you are lucky, someone will ask you to "help them get rid of the pigs" on their land. They won't do that for deer.
6. You can use a variety of firearms. Nothing "special" needed. AR? Great. Shotgun? Great. Rifle? Great. Handgun? Great, why not? Knife and dog? Great.

Yep!!

They're actually just below primates as far as intelligence. 'Smarter than dolphins. When you really start trying to trap them, after the first round of dumb ones, they can frustrate the hell out of you.

Mine have gone almost completely nocturnal. At least they're not running the deer off when the corn feeders go off.

Just shot two in the trap. That Winchester 9422 is a hog killer (at 2 feet). As for my 223, I’m parking it and relegating it to plinker duty and maybe coyotes. Say what you will, but it just isn’t good enough. Spare me the ‘shot placement’ speech. I’m moving up to the 6.5 Grendel.

I've watched a friend on here pump SEVERAL rounds from a Grendel into a spinning boar with little to no effect. We did find him dead however...eventually.

That hole there he is in I dug, it’s about 4 feet deep and at the bottom is 30 lbs of corn.

Friday night, I’m cutting em down again…can’t wait

Hog hunting is quickly becoming my favorite animal to hunt. It's the most accessible type of hunting in Texas and doesn't take a lot of prep. Since they're so plentiful, I can experiment using one caliber one hunt, and another a few weeks later. I like the 7-08 for hogs but won't hesitate to get my 6.5 CM AR-308 out to spice things up a little.

This isn't the tenyearsgone I know. Prozac?

Creekrunner, normally I hunt with the 260. Shot hogs do often run, but not far. And I’d say more do than don’t. Since I have all the stuff to reload for the 260, that puts me in a good spot to reload for the Grendel, I decided to go with that in the AR. So far it has worked real well, but the sample size is small. I really do think it’s more effective than the 223 and probably a bit more forgiving on less than perfect shots. And I have done a few less than perfect shots over the years.

The grandson has used his Grendel (the one I borrow) on a deer and a couple of hogs, they didn’t get any further than the ones he shot last year with the 308.

And, of course, I get a new rifle.

I'm just joshin'. I don't care if you kill 'em with a hammer, just kill 'em.

I’m just getting a bigger hammer…

You forgot to mention, they can be damn fine table fare and made into all sorts of delicious sausages. I prefer feral pork over white tail, and I love white tail meat. I no longer have a place to hunt/trap pigs, that makes me sad. Love pig hunting, always have....

We have a few to take care of soon. Last couple of pics before I moved my camera to a different property.

I like hog hunting because it brings our family together.

I'm on the east coast, got siblings in the mid west, Colorado, nephews in South Dakota and Washington State, we have cousins with a farm in TX that love to have us come down and kill some hogs, so we do a couple family get together's each year.

It's a lot of fun to get together when it's not a funeral. Seems like that's about the only other time we get to see each other.

A family that spills blood together stays together.

I’ve already dropped some with my 6.5 Grendel. Using the factory Hornady Precision Hunter 123 grain ELD-X. This one was DRT.

Last year, I converted all my 5.56 rifles to 300blk for the same reason. You're making a good choice IMO.

More energy, bigger wound channel, don't blame you.

Don’t forget the bow!

And I'll add one of my favorite reasons - you have the option of leaving the hog lie where you kill it. Unlike deer hunting, the work doesn't start when you pull the trigger unless you decide to take some meat.

JR

Eliminates pests and is fun. Unfortunately don't see many to shoot. Maybe I'm lucky?