Not again.......! Feral Hog Control in East Texas

those three little shoats on the left have interesting color patterns
Click to expand...

You can't see all of the hogs in the pic above...but in the video I have of them there are 5 that are striped and 5 that are black.

The majority of the hogs we have are black...but we also have other solid colors (Reddish, Tan, Buff), then mixed colors (black and white, red and black).

The striped pigs above will likely turn all black or dark red as they grow up.

No matter the color...they are equally undesirable.
 
What a crazy day!

Got a small boar for my Birthday this evening. :D

But it was looking pretty grim when the hunt first started.

Bdayboar1.jpg

Yesterday evening I went to my stand about 5:15 p.m. only to scare off a group of pigs that were already there.

Stayed on stand until 10:00 p.m. then left (no pigs). Got the card from the game-cam this morning and the pigs had come back in at 11:10 p.m. (of course). :neener:

O.K., I figure I’ll just go back this evening (extra early) at 4:30 p.m. and be ready for them when they show up. I rested up during the day planning on staying up late if need be.

Well, that was a good ‘plan’…..BUT pigs have ‘plans’ too. This evening……they had a similar plan ( to ALSO to show up early).

When I got there….ALL of the corn was gone and I could see three little black pigs disappearing into the woods at the end of the logging road.

So now….there isn't any corn left on the ground…even IF something comes back.

Not to be discouraged….I trekked over to an automatic feeder I have set up at another site.

Spun the motor by hand until I got a few handfuls of corn on the ground, put some in my coat pocket and went back to the first bait site. Threw the corn out and got on stand. Not the ideal set up…but what the heck.

I hadn’t been on stand 30 minutes when a bunch of mosquitos showed up. Come on guys…this is late December and it’s in the mid 70’s at dark thirty.

The wind finally picked up (front coming) and that blew the mosquitos away (thank you) but that isn’t particularly good for hog hunting.

On top of that, my family members (over the next hour) are texting me “Happy Birthday”. Finally….all of that stops and I am able to concentrate on the hog lights I have set up over the bait.

All is well until I bend over to put the Thermacell on the floor and I get a darn nosebleed! What the heck? :confused:

Not one of those “wipe it on your shirt sleeve and it stops” kind of nosebleed…but a steady drip, drip, drip.

O.K……. I'll just cut a piece off the top of one of my socks and put it in my nose. In the future I WILL take tissues.

There I am….. debating whether to just go to house or wait it out…when I see a shape approaching the light. I didn’t even bother to get my binoculars up, just got my SOCOM up and ready.

At this point…I was going to shoot the first hog that came in and then go to the house.

I watched for a minute to see if any other hogs were with him…but there was not. Even at 125 yds. I could see him clearly under the light.

I settled the crosshair in the middle of his shoulder and sent a 405 gr. Remy Softpoint his way. The hog went straight down but the recoil started my nose REALLY dripping, sheeesh. All in all...I don't know who bled the most.

The bullet exited on the point of the shoulder on the off side (hard to see in the awful phone pics by flashlight).

Anyway, there is one less hog out there. I will try to get the others over the next few days.

I guess I’ll have to go to down there right after lunch. Crazy pigs!
 
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Hey, I've read about a disease some of the razorbacks in TX [& other southern states?] have called "pseudorabies." Apparently leads to lots of piglet deaths etc. My only question is whether [like many pig maladies] it's transmissible to humans & would therefore make slaughtering & eating any of these wild hogs you're hunting a non-starter?
 
Thank you Flintknapper for one of the most entertaining and informative threads on this site.

As a feral pig hater I'm vastly cheered to see so many animals being removed from the environment.
The local biodiversity can only improve.

Here in Australia we too have a feral pig problem and they adapt so well that they are a wide spread issue.

Trapping is fairly common here and I was interested to see what you have been using for bait.
Do you use corn exclusively?
Other grains?
Meat? carcasses? road kill? Carcasses of the pigs you've already shot?

Here we use all those to good effect but the one thing the feral pigs here just can't seem to resist is over ripe bananas.
No, I'm not joking.
Those brown splotched, over ripe bananas that the green grocer can't sell.
Used much the same way as you use your corn.

It might be an interesting exercise to put out a few hands along with your corn and set up the trail cam to see if your American feral hogs like them.

If nothing else the other wild life will enjoy the treat.
 
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Rasberry jello powder on top of corn works well. We will use strawberry koolaid when I can not find jello powder. We dig hole and bate every 4-6 inches as we fill hole with corn and powder on top of ground,they will dig pretty deep to get all corn. Our ground is sand similar to beach sand.
 
Just finished reading all 52 pages in five settings over the past 24 hours or so. This has been the most enlightening thread ever!!!!

I live on 250 acres that is in the Texas Wildlife Management Program in Deep Central Texas. I currently have eight feeders out with a fifty gallon water tank by each but so far have only seen hog evidence one time several years ago. This is good...

I understand they are in Bell County but just not here. I have no year round water source so I stay busy hauling water. This might be my salvation.

We are in one of the driest parts of Central Texas and that may be part of the problem (solution). in the last four months I have had 0.6 inches of rain and it took 5 systems to get that including the one that passed through on its way to Mobile, Alabama yesterday. My deer population has dropped dramatically also; even the coyotes have disappeared (with some assistance from grandsons).

Before anyone asks, I have two grandsons that are equipped with hardware and disposition to handle anything that shows up on the place other than lawyers...:uhoh:
 
I just finished reading the whole thread. Wow, good stuff.

I grew up hunting deer and feral hogs in LLano county, Texas. There are tons of both in the county. My little league baseball coach was a trapper/seller that did some work on family land. This thread has it all pretty well covered, but I had a question/comment or two.

1. Have you tried rooter type doors, so that additional hogs can push in after the trap has been tripped? A lot of folks I know/knew don't even use trip wires but use rooter doors and other methods of allowing multiples to push in. Coach used a cattle trailer converted with a one-way door. He did well for a while, but I reckon the hogs eventually got trap-shy, because production fell off.

2. Previous posts have provided evidence of pigs eating carrion, but I have witnessed it first-hand. A hog I put a friend on was in a creekbed intently devouring something. After the shot, we walked up and found that it was a rotting hog.

3. Grandpa had paying hunters coming in from the big city (Houston). Their idiotic exploits are legendary, including:

a. The old man came in one evening to see the "mule deer" hanging in a tree. It was grandpa's mule. (There are no mule deer in those parts anyway.) "Look Mr. XXXXXX, we got us a mule deer". Grandpa was not happy, so he told them, "That's a fine one." They left with it and took it to the meat processing place in town, where they most likely got laughed at pretty good.
b. Later on, some guys from the same bunch actually killed deer. Grandpa told them that he would be so kind as to remove the poison glands before they took the deer to processing. (He took the tenderloins from all their kills to compensate himself for the mule.)

c. Guys fairly regularly wounded animals without recovering them and brought animals in with anywhere from 3 to 5 bullet wounds, and stories of how hard hogs are to kill.

d. A guy shot a black cow thinking it was a turkey.

e. Guys would bring rifles still in boxes, and expect to bolt scopes on and go shoot animals without even zeroing the scopes. Wannabe soldier types would come wanting to "test out" their weapons on live animals, to see what they could do. Wannabe warrior types would sometimes hunt by running through the pastures all done up in camo and face paint.

f. A guy with a semi-auto deer rifle emptied his magazine and wounded two out of several he was firing at. When pops went out a good several minutes after the shots, the two wounded deer were there, still alive, but down. When informed that the two deer (butt shot and gut shot) were still alive, the guy threw his rifle down onto the ground movie style, and proceeded to jump on and stab the deer to death.


Those and many others are why landowners don't let just anybody come and "help out" with the hog problem.
 
It’s not like me to let hogs ‘walk’…..but I did this afternoon. :confused:

A group of 7 small hogs (40 lbs. each) came in not 5 minutes after I got on stand.

I just couldn't bring myself to waste a .458 bullet on one of those little footballs …. and they never would ‘line up’ for me, so I just watched them for a while...then let them walk away.

Maybe trap them later on.

small_ones_1.jpg

small_ones_2.jpg
 
In the first pic is that a deer behind the herd of pigs? It looks like a deer looking your way.
Click to expand...

No, just leaves on the tree that by coincidence have the same shape.

The road drops off behind the hogs and you would not be able to see a deer standing very far behind them, not to mention....my deer wouldn't be caught dead near any hogs.

BUT.....'good eye', you picked out a horizontal 'line' against what is primarily a vertical background (trees). Many folks never learn to do that.
 
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