Double Naught Spy
Sus Venator
Actually, there are videos of successful hog hunting down to .22 subsonic and .17 hmr. You can snipe a hog just like you can any other animal (though maybe not legal for other animals) with smaller calibers if you know what you are doing, but that doesn't make those caliber necessarily very good or ideal for 'hog hunting' in general.
As for why there are so many good videos of hog stops on YouTube isn't because the cartridges or bullets are necessarily working just fine for hogs. It is because people tend to NOT post videos of when things don't work well. I know this from personal experience on posting vids where the results are not what people liked. Commenters on YouTube can be rather cruel in their evaluations of the video creators, their capabilities, cartridges, calibers, bullets, gear, etc. I have found that on YouTube, everybody knows more about what I am doing than I do. However, with ammo testing, you get some varied results.
Hogs really are not difficult to kill, but what surprises a lot of people is the hogs' propensity to run after being shot if they don't suffer CNS damage. Generally, with a decent double lung or heart or heart-lung shot, a hog usually won't run more than 100 yards and commonly much less. In that distance, they will bleed out or suffocate (lungs fill with blood) and then finally collapse. Unless you are in a nice open field, however, this can make them hard to find.
Another matter that confounds hunters and tricks them into believing hogs are tougher than they are is that they sometimes seal up after through and through shots and so don't produce blood trails or don't produce good blood trails. This is due to shields and fat layers on boars and fat layers on sows helping close up the exit wounds known for helping create blood trails. The hogs still bleed out, only it is internal, but there is little or no trail left behind to follow. Sometimes, the damage inside is massive, but there is very little blood coming from the exit wound.
The only way a hog consistently drops in place is by suffering significant CNS damage, ideally upper CNS damage, either directly through direct physical impact of the bullet on the brain, brain stem, or upper spinal cord, or indirectly through hydraulic shock or hydrostatic shock (two different phenomena, though the terms are often used interchangeably).
People are also impressed and equally confounded when they shoot a hog multiple times before it died, failing to understand that the first shot might have been lethal, just not immediately lethal (non-upper CNS significant damage), and once the adrenaline dumps, the hog isn't apt to go down until it bleeds out, suffocates, or suffers a later upper CNS damaging shot. So they shoot the hog time and time again trying to get it to go down and it eventually does, but they are convinced the hog had supernatural powers.
Interestingly, you will find the same type of evaluation on folks shooting things like raccoons, opossums, and armadillos. Here is a classic example... https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/evil.905314/
So we find that smaller, less powerful calibers tend to do less damage and bring down hogs less efficiently than larger calibers on non-CNS shots. Non-expanding bullets tend to bring down hogs less efficiently than expanding bullets of the same caliber. So there is a very real correlation with the amount of damage being done with the bullet and bringing down hogs.
Why this is important is because as hunters, not every shot we take is a perfect shot. If we did, there would be no need for expanding bullets, tracking dogs, and blood trails and in many cases, we would be just fine with shooting smaller, less powerful calibers. We would all make low or no meat damaging upper CNS shots and hogs, deer, bear, elk, etc. would all drop in place. However, buck fever, physical exertion, animal movement, environmental conditions, varying distances, etc. all conspire to make hunters something less than exceptionally accurate benchrest shooters when in the field.
So getting back to the Grendel-Ham'r query, they are going to be superior to much smaller calibers such a .223, particularly when it comes to non-perfect shots. People may find better results with even larger calibers, but that often then starts getting into a lot more recoil. Sniping recoil isn't so much of an issue for singular kills, but recoil and reset time is a significant issue for followup shots when dealing with trying to kill multiples of hogs in sounders or when dealing with a poorly made first shot.
