When Hunting, Take Advantage of Hog Vulnerabilities
On your next hunt, make sure you take full advantage of hog vulnerabilities. Here are just a few.
FOLLOW THE MESS
You will know when they are in the neighborhood even if you do not see them. Just like the pigs they are, feral hogs are messy eaters and have messy habits. Their lifestyle causes damage to agricultural fields and crops, forests, streams, and the environment in general. Telltale signs include rooting, trampling, wallows, and tree and post rubs.
GET THEM DURING MATING SEASON
During mating season, both males and females get distracted and really create a ruckus. Boars are fighting each other, and sows and boars are litter making. This is when they are most vulnerable. For a good read on how a group of hunters took advantage of all this activity see: Ken Perrotte’s Outdoors Column: Stealth is key in feral hog control hunts.
USER THEIR GRUNTS AGAINST THEM
Recorded hog calls – grunts, general contact grunting, low grunts, nursing grunts, and feeding solicitation grunts – is particularly useful in luring hogs. Some of the commercially available calls and sounds you can get include feeding frenzy, contented feedings, social grunts, fighting boar, and piglets feeding.
Sows go ballistic if they hear a piglet-in-distress call. This can flush a sow out of cover in a hurry. Hang you recording device on a tree away from you! Sows share maternal care for the young, so you might get more than one charging to the rescue. For your kit of hunting tools, download a free piglet in distress call.
TAKE BACK THE NIGHT
Where there is a lot of human pressure on a feral hog population or where it is just too hot during the day, hogs will feed at night. For a while this was an unchallenged advantage for the hog. However, following the hogs into the night, hunters are now taking it back the night with lights and other technologies. One of the latest night hunting techniques is to use covert lights, such as Game Alert®, with motion activation and illumination that has minimal to no effect on normal hog behavior – stealth hunting at its best.
Hunt smart, hunt safe.
Do you have a hog hunting hint or tale? Tell us about it.
