Rifle build for wild boar

A friend of mine has a smaller setup like this. Bears keep getting in and eating the bait. Sometimes they don't even use the door- they just climb over getting in and out.

 

Pigs aren’t hard to kill. Your 5.56 will do the job just fine within 200 yards using heavy bullets.

 

I would listen long and hard to Double Naught Spy who has likely shot more hogs than everyone else here combined.

Are you hunting hogs, or shooting driven boar? Because the latter is predominantly a European endeavor and your choice of firearm will be driven by European regulations. The Blazer R8 is probably the right choice for that. Although I think they have a new super fast pump gun that would work well too.

For hogs, if it’s to be one gun, a s/a is a good choice and the AR is probably ideal for accessories and optics, especially if you will be night hunting. Cartridge? You’ll get plenty of advice there….

I like a lever gun for day hunting and walking ‘em up. 30-30 and 35 Rem would be my choices, and if you wanted heavy hitting, there’s 444 Marlin.

 

It’s just what we do to keep the hogs off our place. It’s an on going activity, as well as hunting loan animals outside the sounder. We do have wildlife management land but that’s just because it’s the only way to keep the lands tax exemption, they don’t give us anything except threats to revoke the exemption if we don’t assemble the packet of information for them every year. That said, I agree with you, for sure!

 

For many years i hunted hogs on WMA and federal property where use of centerfire rifles were illegal outside deer season. Killed dozens of wild hogs weighing up to 250 pounds using .22 long rifle and .22 magnum rifles. Bullet placement matters.

One huge feral boar had "shields" 2.5 inches thick. Shot that hog with a .50 caliber inline muzzleloader firing the 250 grain .45 caliber SST bullet in a sabot: Velocity was 1,850-1,900 fps: Distance was 35-40 yards. Bullet penetrated both "shields" and was found under the skin on the off side. Bullet destroyed both lungs.

 

I am quoting you, not out of disagreement, but because you are the last to echo the sentiment that hogs are not hard to kill, and I don't agree with you, however, there is a prevailing perception that hogs are particularly tough, hard to kill, etc. There are people that suggest that hogs are so hard to kill because they apparently have something unique or special about their nervous systems that is yet unexplained by science.

https://www.thehighroad.org/index.p...bout-hogs-nervous-system.543619/#post-6735749

Here, in RH45's opinion, hogs have no central nervous system, which is an amazing claim to explain away improper shooting, bullet choice, caliber, etc., but s/he made. I remember dissecting hogs in chordate anatomy and being tested over the CNS, yet s/he doesn't think hogs have one. Oddd.
https://www.thehighroad.org/index.p...a-sidearm-for-hogs.493217/page-3#post-6140091

However, hard to kill really just seems like it means that hogs simply don't tend to drop in place without CNS damaging shots and that hogs are not as fragile as deer and rabbits. If more hunters treated hogs like deer and all the reverence given to deer and deer hunting, they would shoot a hog and it would run into the woods and the hunters would way 15 or 30 minutes and then go trail it the 50 or 100 yards into the woods, find it, proclaim the shot to be in the right place, having brought down the hog after a typical run distance and not think twice about its toughness.

Bottom line, far too many people don't understand behavior and anatomy, much less terminal ballistics. More often than not when a hunter tells me that a hog soaked up a lot of shots, if you examine the hog, it did, but the shots were mostly pretty pathetic in terms of being what would be necessary to bring a hog down quickly. You will find a lung shot (maybe the opener) or two, a shot to the front leg, a shot to the rump, a couple of gut shots and a fresh hole through an ear and they wonder why the hog ran. Simply put, none of the shot were the type to be immediately fatal. OR you find no shots to the actual vitals and they literally swiss cheesed the hog until it bleed out.

This is an extreme example of what I am talking about, but I see similar failures to comprehend what is going on with shots elsewhere. Two goobers have a wounded hog and decide to finish it off with a .44 mag and claim the bullets are bouncing off the hog's head. Idiocy. Watching close, you will notice nearly all the shots miss the hog entirely, especially the one that was to be in the hog's eye. That piece of bullet jacket they find was stripped off by the log it impacted, not the hog.

I feel pretty strongly that if we shoot hogs properly like skilled deer hunters and treated hogs that run off like we treat deer that run off and accept the fact that animals not-CNS damaged will run off, we would not think of hogs as being particular special. We don't do this as a community, however. Hogs and hog hunting seems to be a spray and pray paradise for a goodly number of poor shooting hunters who are just amazed by the hog's ability to withstand getting shot and then assigning Super Porcine powers to the hogs to justify what they did wrong as hunters.

If you shoot a hog through both lungs or the hear with a decent hunting round, it isn't going much over 100 yards and usually much less. Shoot it in one lung and it may go over 400 yards before collapsing (I did this and tracked it). Liver shots seem to be a crap shoot, but generally speaking down within 100 yards, if not 200 (and I am not talking about clipping the very edge of any of these with grazing organ shots). You just have to find them once they run and they can be hard to find sometimes because they tend to seal back up and not leave good blood trails. So people lose a lot of hogs and think the "tough" hogs got away and are living their best lives somewhere else.

 

I understand what you are saying, but I stand by my position that pigs are not hard to kill, in the sense that they are no harder to kill than a whitetail deer. I also agree with your assessment that more pigs are not recovered because people don’t bother to go look for them. I am among that number, I’m simply not wasting my time looking for a pig if it doesn’t drop in place.

I don’t eat wild pork and view wild pigs purely as a pest. I’d rather move on to the next pig than spend time looking for a pig that isn’t bleeding much while rushing through the gnarliest habitat imaginable. Generally speaking if I’m pig hunting, I’m probably guiding and time spent tracking is not appreciated by a guy who drove across three states to shoot pigs at night. And, like you said, blood tracking a pig is tough because their wounds do often tend to seal themselves with fat and thick skin.

 

I used to hunt hogs a few times each year from the loft of a barn on one of our cattle partner’s properties in TX, east of Nacogdoches. I used a 22-250 and a 223rem, and we’d stack bodies beneath multiple feeders spaced every couple hundred yards in a clear cut running perpendicular to the barn.

My current hog rifle is a 10.5” SBR-15 in 6.8spc. I’d likely rather have it in 6.5 Grendel these days, but I’m not motivated to replace the barrel.

 

I see the term thickskinned as it mostly occurs, to appy to certain African game. Sure you can say the thickness of the boars shield is thick, but at the end of the day any game that can be safely felled with a reasonable bullet from a 243win at any reasonable angle is no more 'thickskinned' than anything else its size.

 

All I can say is the guys shooting the most hogs are Australians and New Zealanders in that order. Aussies in particular have the worlds largest populations of them, they actually outnumber humans in some states( I mean tens of millions of hogs). Pick up an aussie mag or join one of their forums and the comments from the guys are along the lines that pigs are light skinned easy game to take and they fall down pretty fast. If hogs were as bad as folks say those continents would be a blood bath. Meanwhile in the US the boar is considered some kind of bullet absorbing battle tank. I really think its just the fact some fellas in gun articles mentioned the fighting nature of boars and the respect you should give them in a general sense and its get taken out of context and repeated over and over.

 

Most people who haven't already hunted hogs tend to aim a bit further back than they need to. Most aim like they were going to shoot a deer and end up in the front or middle of their stomach. The vitals on a hog are a bit more forward and centered straight up their front legs.

In the past 20+ years I have no idea how many I have taken both helping out with depredation and filling freezers. With our efforts we used many firearms and with proper shot placement in the front portion of the chest most either dropped or stopped within 20-30yds similar to a doube lung hit deer.

My most used tool was a little Ruger Compact in .308 loaded with 150gr Rem CL's. If I didn't have that I carried a 7.5" Redhawk in 41mag loaded with 200gr Rem JHP'S. We also used rifle calibers from 22 up to the 300 RUM, and multiple handgun calibers, for shots ranging from point blank to out past 800yds. Just part of what we encorperated in an ongoing effort to reduce populations in the areas we hunted. We used every means available and they still prevailed. They are as mentioned a plague on the land.

No matter what caliber you decide on, do some looking on the net and study their anatomy and place your shots accordingly.

 

I've only shot European boar but I doubt they are any harder to kill than feral hogs. Shoot one and wound it and they can carry a wound well. We have minimum calibers for shooting large hoofed game. In Sweden it starts at 6.5x55.
As a lot of our boar shooting is driven hunting there are those who think you need a .375 H&H or a 9.3x74 to kill boar. The problem with these larger calibers is that because of the cost of ammo and many find the recoil a bit much they never get enough practice to get too a decent shooting standard. I shoot a 8x57jrs or my .308 on driven boar days. Those two rounds will kill any boar walking the planet if I do my part.

 

That is one time where “in one ear and out the other” is a good thing. None of these took a step. Real easy to follow a blood trail when it’s instead a puddle.

 

In the ear and out the eye works too.

 

As a novice hog hunter i was amazed to see a 200 pound boar hit the ground at the shot, scream like a banshee for 30 seconds while i frantically reloaded the front stuffer. Then the hog jumped up and booked-fast. i shot that hog behind the ear. There's nothing vital directly behind a hogs ear. That has happened to me several times.

About half my hog kills are bang flops. CNS shots high in the shoulder and high behind the shoulder drops hogs in their tracks.

This very old boar was killed on Quanah Parker range, Fort Sill. There was a tag in his ear from a game farm in Bavaria. A wealthy resident of OK City ordered 50 pairs of boars and loosed them north of highway 62 in western OK. Shot that boar in the ear several times with a Ruger 10/.22.




Wild hog anatomy: