Rounded tracks used for hunting feral hogs

When you go after feral hogs, it helps to be realistic from the beginning. This means you concede that the hog has senses of smell and hearing and wariness superior to yours.
You don’t stalk or chase hogs unless you have some stout-hearted and specialist dogs, but you can find hog “signs” and you seek to ambush them, said Ricky Hamilton of Hope, a veteran hog hunter.
“Look for hog trails,” Hamilton said. “Just like cows and deer, hogs use the same routes, and they leave a trail. You look for tracks, and a hog track is much more rounded that a deer track. They may be about the same size, but the round hog track is what separates it from the pointed deer track.”
Find a hog trail, and you may find a rub tree. This is one where hogs rub their tusks to sharpen them. A deer rub tree will have the bark gone a couple of feet up from the ground. A hog rub tree will have much of the tree gone about the same distance up. Hamilton and Randy Bobo of Hope took a visitor to a hog rub tree that was nearly cut in half. It was dead from steady use by hogs.
OK, you find where the hogs are traveling, and if it is on private land, you put out bait, Hamilton said. Baiting is not allowed on public lands, including the wildlife management areas of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. But bait draws hogs with their voracious appetites.
Hamilton uses shelled corn that he soaks and lets sit for a couple of days. This way, the smell becomes potent, and the corn becomes a hog magnet.
Hamilton often puts the smelly corn on or next to an established hog trail. He waits a couple or three days, then sets a trap over the pile of corn.
He said, “Some people sprinkle their bait around a trap then put some inside. I like to just put the trap over the corn that the hogs are eating.”
If hunting is your object, a deer stand can be set up within good shooting range of the corn bait, but keep in mind the wariness of wild hogs. If a stand is permanent, already in place, then the hunter has an advantage. The hogs are used to the stand being there.
Bobo and Hamilton said seldom do you find hogs out in the open except very early and late in the day.
“They like it dark,” Hamilton said, one reason why many people going after feral hogs prefer traps over shooting. Lighting can be a handicap in getting a clear shot at a hog.
Weapons used in hog hunting vary widely. There are hunters who use archery. There are people who use flat-shooting varmint rifles along with others who go with shotguns and slug or buckshot loads. Most use the same rifles they use to hunt deer.
Dr. Lester Sitzes of Hope, who often hunts hogs with Bobo and Hamilton, said, “A rifle in the .30 caliber category is what most people go after hogs with.” And Sitzes related an incident in which he killed a hog at fairly long range with a .220 Swift, a varmint category rifle.
If it’s trapping hogs instead of hunting them, nearly any firearm will be lethal at close range, Hamilton said. Some hog trappers use pistols for ease in carrying.
Still another form of feral hog hunting is the use of dogs, and this was the method that sparked numerous tales from the old days in Arkansas.
Dogs chase a hog until it tires and turns to fight the dogs. Trained hog dogs go for the ears of the bayed animal — and trained hog dogs are often scarred from slashes of tusks. When the hunter arrives, the hog is shot, with the hunter making sure a dog isn’t hit instead.
Then there is also the macho technique, the gambit of dispatching the cornered hog with only a knife. Yes, the rugged pioneers did this — some of them. And yes, Hamilton said, there are some people, a few, who do it today. It is not recommended.
But there always will be a “hey, y’all, watch this” element in our outdoor society.

Gary Scheel
NAHC LM,RMEF LM,NRA Member, Lonestar Bowhunter, TexasHogHunter Pro Staff Member