At the Ranch - Hog: Hog Hunting Made Easy

For another episode of At the Ranch we’re going to talk about probably the easiest and most practical way to hunt a feral hog and that is just the recreational, traditional means of hunting. It’s actually pretty simple. What you want to do first off is find an area where there have been at least feral hog sightings and maybe look for some signs. Keep in mind that feral hogs like to get into crop fields so if there’s any wheat or anything like that nearby, they’ll go in and root the ground up, so it’ll look like little tilled spots in circles and that is a fresh sign there are hogs in that area.

From there, at least in the state of Texas, you’d always want to check your game laws. In the state of Texas it is legal to bait feral hogs, so pretty much one of the easiest ways would be to get a deer feeder, or a hog feeder, that broadcast corn. You can set it on a timer so that the pigs are patterned off of when your timer goes off, and then you’re able to get the hogs into the open during daylight hours.

You can hunt feral hogs by traditional means including bow hunting, rifle hunting, or anything like that. One thing I would say is if you are rifle hunting, don’t use too small of a caliber as they’re a very strong animal. If you’re wanting to recover these animals for consumption or anything like that, tracking them can be dangerous if they’re just wounded, so I always recommend using something in the .30 caliber range. A 7mm mag works really well for them also. Any of those larger, more powerful rifle cartridges just ensure that you can get them with the most force possible so that they die and are more easily recovered. The worst thing ever is to shoot one right before dark, go out and try to track it, and stumble upon a wounded boar.