We have been waging a war against feral hogs for years and we are losing! According to multiple studies, you need to kill 70% of the feral hog population each year to keep the population in check. We’re not exactly sure how many pigs that equates to on our property (2500 acres) but we’re guessing that the # is somewhere in the hundreds.
This year we have trapped heavily and been pretty successful in our trapping endeavors. We’ve trapped and shot over 70 pigs since January of this year. I’m using box type traps and we catch mostly juvenile pigs in the traps. In the below pic, we caught 11 young pigs in one trap.
We have 5 or 6 of these type traps. Wild pigs are extremely smart and learn from their mistakes. Once we catch a group of pigs in a trap, we have to move the traps to another location. The pigs that weren’t trapped in that group won’t go back into that trap. This is a manual process that requires a lot of man-hours. There are more sophisticated traps out there that use motion sensors and live cameras. We’re not that high tech yet but I hope to eventually purchase one of these traps. Since my manual trapping isn’t putting a big enough dent in our population and I can’t afford one of these new traps (over $4,000) as well as not being able to dedicate enough time to run the trap, I decided to invest in a thermal sight.
I can at least have a little fun in eradicating these pesky hogs. I decided to go with a budget thermal from ATN. I was a little hesitant to invest $1,500 in a thermal budget scope but I’ve been impressed so far. On the first night out with the scope, we saw over 40 pigs. The furthest being over 500 yards away. We killed 10 pigs that first night and several of them were momma pigs. I’m hoping that this will help control the population. These are two buddies of mine that I took out on the first hog excursion.
