My times with hogs
This is One of the most interesting and infomative hog threads on the entire internet.
For those interested in Hog Hunts near Houston,Texas there is a former farmer here in Winnie that does them at the price of $50 an evening, it was Bowhunt only but have heard rumors that he has gone to guns. He does not promise a kill, however before I fell into my hunting area I made a kill 90% of the time with my bow. Largest boar I have seen off the place was near the 550 mark, they are corn fed and clean to eat. he gave up farming because he couldn't get rid of them fast enough and began raising deer, bison, and released russian strain boars (at least thats the rumor) to make the hogs more marketable.
PM Me if you want any more information.
I now hunt over 3000 acres belonging to a local ricefarmer, of which 1000 of them are not available to hunt from september to feb as those are the main hunting season's around here and that land is leased to other hunters dureing that time. That fact there makes it hard to control the hogs on said property, we can however trap them still. We exterminate nutria rats, coons (on the land with crawfish farms), coyotes, and, my favorite, hogs.
We spotlight at night with a tika 7mm 08 and me on my AR in 5.56, we don't use night vision, infrared ect ect, just 2 spotlights and 2 guns. I shoot the smaller hogs, useing the neck shot Flint uses while my hunting partner drops the larger ones, our record for one night is 25 hogs from 60 to 300 pounds. Largest hog we have shot was an out of the blue sow that walked up on our coyote setup she was in the 600 range, i took her with a triple tap to the chest area useing 2 55 grain ball ammo and one 63 grain tracer round. She was running at me and she was very upset lol, most likely the closest call I will ever have while hunting here in the States.
Best time we have found to catch them at night is on a full or near full moon, dureing the day we search for shallow water sources in deep cover. If its been a hot afternoon and a sudden Texas T Storm rolls in, we roll out as that will make them move early and often they can be caught in wide open ground. At one point and time we could drive a Mule within 15 feet of them and slaughter indescriminatly if it was raining and thundering, now however thats impossible.
A local rice farmer rented a chopper out of Beaumont a few months ago (600 dollars for 4 hours) and killed 78 before he ran out of ammo, his weapon of choice was a Saiga 12 gauge shooting slugs, had a high capacity drum mag on it. Largest 2 hogs he shot where 2 sows that weighed in at 737 and 786. As he made kills he dropped Helium filled aluminum ballons with weights tied on the bottem of them so that his workers could come drag them out of the ricefield. These particular sounders, aprox 5 of them, where destroying up to 10 acres of crop a NIGHT!, most of it merely from them moveing from one point to another. Another farmer here in Town hunts them out of a para sail useing a saiga, their record is 25 in 4 hours. These two farmers are STILL haveing hog trouble,
Me and my partner give our meat to anyone who is needy and asks, failing that the local state trapper takes it and uses it for cyanide traps for coyotes, other hunters may want to consider doing the same as the state does not pay for the trappers bait, game wardens may have a use for it too as on more than one occasion I have been asked by them if we had any fresh kills in the field.