Hog bait

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Do y'all think persimmon corn will attract hogs better than regular deer corn or is it about the same. Since it smells sweet I figured it would be better but I want y'all's 0.02
 
Do y'all think persimmon corn will attract hogs better than regular deer corn or is it about the same. Since it smells sweet I figured it would be better but I want y'all's 0.02

This discussion comes up quite a bit on various hunting forums. This is my take...

While scented corn, soured corn, corn mixed with jello/kool-aid, sweet feed, commercial scented 'attractants' and so on all seem like they should logically be better attractants than corn alone, it has been my experience with testing several of them that they are not. Yes, hogs may (eventually) show up and eat the stuff and they may really like it, but hogs will eventually show up and eat just about anything (except I have never gotten them to eat any of the free, unused pumpkins I have gotten after Halloween for several years).

The idea behind scented attractants is that they will be able to attract hogs over longer distances. Supposedly, hogs can smell truffles up to 7 miles away above ground and up to 25 feet underground. I have seen these numbers repeated several times on the internet.:scrutiny: No doubt hogs have a great sense of smell and maybe they can smell your special bait from a farther distance. However, the real question is whether or not they will act on it over that distance MORE SO than they will act on just coming to corn. In the various tests I have done over the years, I just don't find that to be the case.

Hogs are only going to travel so far for a resource. Maybe they can smell the persimmon corn from 7 miles away, but they can also smell all of the other resources available to them in that 7 mile distance. They will be full and done eating long before they get to you. ;)

I think it was flintknapper who pointed out that if you have hogs in the area, they will find your corn. Of course, if you don't have them in the area, then they won't. You aren't going to get hogs that aren't already in your immediate area anyway.

Most of the time when I see or hear about people testing a new attractant, they place it in a location where they are already baiting hogs, such as running apple corn or persimmon corn (in your case) through a feeder that has probably been set up for many seasons. I saw an episode of Pigman where he talked about the great success of using some attractant that the dumped on the ground all around a feeder he had running on his property and was able to shoot a pig on the following day. He proclaimed the attractant to be a great success and recommended that his viewers purchase it. Strangely, he is apparently no longer using said attractant since they stopped sponsoring him. Anyway, the point is that if you have a feeder that is already up and running, then you have an established bait spot that animals have learned about and will check on a regular or irregular basis. Your feeder is a known resource of the area, right? So if you add attractant to your feeder area, how do you know if the attract really worked, or if the hogs just came in anyway for the corn they expected to find? I know from game camera images that I have had hogs show up to a feeder for up to 10 days after the feeder was empty. So even without any corn there, hogs still showed up. How is that for a miracle attractant?

Trying new attractants is fun and interesting. We are all looking for that miracle attractant that is going to give us the edge. I would like to say that there is no harm in trying, but that may not be true, either. Here are some of the downsides I have experienced in trying new attractant products and foods.

1. The introduction of a new smell into an area may actually temporarily drive away hogs and other animals, not because the smell is bad, but because it is a change to the environment. Many animals do not like sudden changes. This may actually delay the benefit of attracting hogs. Once they get used to it, then it isn't a problem.
2. Expense. Most of the attractants you will try add expense to your hunting. Some of the expenses are minimal. Some are outrageous. I have tried and have used apple-scented corn and sweet feed, but both when they were comparably priced to plane corn. There have been times that sweet feed has actually been cheaper than regular corn, which is a benefit.
3. Additional handling issues. This won't be the case for persimmon corn, but things like soured corn and attractants that you don't mix with corn in your feeders require additional steps. Soured corn requires time to make, care in transporting (and you don't want to spill any of this in your vehicle), and then deployment.
4. Some attractants have a sticky factor. Apple corn does as do some of the additives that include sugar in them. This can be a exacerbated in particularly humid areas. I never had a problem with apple corn gumming up the feeder as it wasn't that sticky, but it is a potential issue.
5. Sweet feed can actually absorb moisture from the air or if you get blowing rain that gets on your spinner plate, the sweet feed will absorb it and SWELL, gumming up your feeder.
6. Animals other than hogs may find and consume the special bait long before hogs arrive. For example, every time I try watermelons, the deer and raccoons will devour them in short order.

For me, the bottom line determining factor is that if these great attractants really worked that much better, then we would all be using them and all be shooting a lot more hogs. What I have noticed is that even when people swear by a given attractant as working really well is that quite strangely, they don't use the attractant all the time and they don't seem to be killing any more hogs. No doubt hogs are attracted to and eat a lot of stuff, but I just don't see where any of it is particularly better than just plain corn. YMMV
 
Will persimmon corn still have that sour smell if I soak it in water or will the persimmon mask the sent. Btw I'm just spreading the corn on the ground.

You soak it in water and the corn will start to ferment and have the sour smell. It may or may not still have persimmon smell, but it will have the sour smell, definitely.
 
but hogs will eventually show up and eat just about anything (except I have never gotten them to eat any of the free, unused pumpkins I have gotten after Halloween for several years).

:D

So true. If only they would eat zucchini and summer squash, they would be of some use!
 
Regular old feed corn from tractor supply seems to work fine here. It seems to me that once they find a food source, they will keep coming back to it. At most, I would maybe mix in some jello powder or molasses or something like that at first when setting up a new bait pile, but I wouldn't worry about it after they have visited it.
 
I've tried it all, beer even. Yeah, that's one of the things I've been told, dump beer on the corn. The ONLY thing they ever came to was strawberry koolaid dumped over corn and I cannot confirm that was not just a coincidence. I wasn't hunting over the bait, but setting a trap with the bait. It caught pigs, but it wasn't instant and I figure I'd been just as well off with plain old deer corn.

Problem I've been having lately is keeping the deer out of the trap, so I've not set it in quite a while. There's so danged many deer here, but then, I guess that's a good thing. I'd much rather eat pork, though.
 
Regular old feed corn from tractor supply seems to work fine here. It seems to me that once they find a food source, they will keep coming back to it. At most, I would maybe mix in some jello powder or molasses or something like that at first when setting up a new bait pile, but I wouldn't worry about it after they have visited it.

Every convenience store in rural Texas has deer corn. Not a problem finding it here. And, it's about all the same price. Walmart has it cheaper until you read on the bag that it's 40 lbs. I can get it at the nearest convenience store for about the same price if you figure pound for pound.
 
Wanna know the cheapest and best hog attractant? Go by any local Chinese restaurant and asked them if you can have a bucket full of their old fryer grease. Go out the woods and dump it out in a spot similar to what you'd do to create a mineral site for deer. The hogs will come in there and have that area rooted up in no time! Keep freshening up your grease site as needed.
 
I've occasionally spread strawberry Jell-O around. It's sweet and aromatic. I can't say I've noticed anything special except in one instance.
We had a large boar (295 Lbs) that hung around our box trap for months, eating everything outside and just inside the trap. He wouldn't enter the trap and he chased other hogs away. For months we didn't trap anything at all. One day I put the Jell-O inside the trap. That night the boar went in and we caught him. That's how I know he weighed 295#.

Notes: This is a sample size of one. It's difficult to establish a trend from a single data point.
The boar was already coming to the area to eat the corn we'd been spreading. The Jell-O just lured him a little further into the trap. It didn't make him magically appear from a distance.
 
Wanna know the cheapest and best hog attractant? Go by any local Chinese restaurant and asked them if you can have a bucket full of their old fryer grease. Go out the woods and dump it out in a spot similar to what you'd do to create a mineral site for deer. The hogs will come in there and have that area rooted up in no time! Keep freshening up your grease site as needed.

Been there done that. Left a great big greasy spot that attracted plenty of flies, but not a single hog. Hogs still hit the feeder about 20 yards further out, but could not have cared less about the old grease/oil.

No doubt it can work, but like I said above, just about any food can work, once in a while or some of the time.

If there was a miracle attractant that truly worked better, we would all be using it, and about the only thing we all use is corn.
 
That definitely seems to be the hit around my neck of the woods. Lots of guys pouring the old grease on a rotten log and letting it absorb it. Then the hogs come in an eat the rotten log completely up.
 
I have tried a bunch of different things over the years from koolaid, various fermented corn recipes, granulars etc. What they like most is a steady supply and if you add a new supply put it in between existing ones.

This trap was put in place between two existing feeders right in their trail. We quit about 12 hours before and set up the feeder later that afternoon.

41E17201-C144-4DDB-BD0A-B6B7A32C1E47.jpeg

“Pig Out” is something they certainly like, I have poured that in the sand by itself and they eat the sand! Not needed IMO though.

In the end I think everything that eats meat is attracted to chickens and herbivores to corn.
 
I’ve tried it all too. And it’s all a gimmick. Want to attract hogs and not deer? Add some diesel to your corn. A cup in a 40lb bag will do just fine. Just need enough to coat it. The coons will eat the hell out of it. So will pigs. But deer won’t. They might try it, but they will leave. The hogs however, will keep coming back. Once the hogs have established the site, you don’t need the diesel anymore. But you can continue to use it to keep the deer away.

I’ve been doing this for years. It’s cheap and it works.
 
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