Worse Than Californians

Hunting, Nature

Yeah, they’re a pestilence too:

It’s open season year-round on feral pigs, whose population in Texas has grown to nearly 3 million. Hunters are not required to retrieve carcasses, although there’s an incentive to do so: “wild boar” sells for up to 60 cents a pound.

If anyone’s organizing one of these hunts in the near future, let me know.  I have a new rifle that needs blooding.

36 comments

  1. Please let me know too. Last time I looked, the organized hunts cost you upwards of $1000. Apparently, people in Texas expect to get paid for letting you hunt on their land, even pests.

    I’d drive just about anywhere in Texas from the Houston area for this.

    I’d have to scare up some .30-06 ammo for my Remington 700 or some .308 for my CETME. I’ve got a sufficiency of ball ammo, but only smidge of hunting rounds in the locker.

    1. LOL that’s like being charged a grand for a prairie dog hunt. We’re talking vermin, here. Size is irrelevant.

      1. Up in E Oregon, they have a type of gopher or ground squirrel or something that eats vast quantities of alfalfa which is about the only thing that grows there. . So the local ranchers organize safaris where they haul around a double decker trailer with riflemen on both levels. No idea what this costs.

    2. Wild boars have a thick layer of cartilage known as the shield from their neck down to below the rib cage. I’d stick with the FMJ rather than the expandable rounds.

      Cooking method:
      After you’ve harvested the beast, hopefully it will still be living so you can stick* it and let it bleed out. Next hang the beast, gut it, skin it, and behead it being careful not to rupture the bladder. Carve it up into its constituent parts. Have a decent sized caldron with a good fire going under it. Throw in the meat along with a brick. Cook for about a week with 7/24 tending of the fire. Finally throw away the meat and eat the brick.

      * Wherein comes the phrase: Squealing like a stuck pig. The “sticking” is performed with a sharp metal tube which is jammed into the animal’s heart.

  2. Last time I looked into this you could get a canned hunt not to far from DFW. A few hundred bucks, and it included room and board. You had to pay for the pig if you were keeping it.

    I’ll have to do my pooh-bear think think think to remember the details and where the hell I saw it.

    I do have friends that pig hunt all the time that I could probably glom on for the price of a good bottle.

    1. “I do have friends that pig hunt all the time that I could probably glom on for the price of a good bottle.”

      That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for. A grand just to hunt vermin? Pass.

      1. Well, you can leave there with nearly a quarter ton of pork. So there is that.

        I lived not to far from you, for the last 17 years or so. Now I live slightly south.

        I wonder, as not a native Texan, do you have this issue?

        I know at least half a dozen dudes with hunting leases. Not one, not ever, has invited me on a hunt. Oh, they’ll talk about it. They’ll talk about the weekend they just spent hunting, or how their dogs performed. But not once, not ever have they invited me along. I’ve known some of these dudes nearly 20 years. I guess I’ve never asked. But back on the east coast, I’d go all the time. Friends would organize hunts on their land, or others. Or I could head to the national forest. I figured it was a Texas thing. There are caveats to their leases.

        I guess it’s time to ask.

        1. Let me add to that. I have two brother in laws that hunt all over, all the time. Not one invite.

          Don’t know what the issue could be (sniff, sniff checking my pits).

          I think it’s that I simply don’t ask. I will now.

  3. Maybe the reason the pigs are spreading everywhere is BECUASE people are charging a grand to hunt them. If I was a farmer, not only would I let people hunt for free on my property I’d set up a grill to cook the damn things after you shot it. “Sure, come on over and eradicate these things that are destroying my property and costing me money!”

    1. Whatever they’re going for, I suspect there’s not enough $$ in all the global economy to take ’em all out.

    2. With the price of ammo these days, I doubt they bring in enough to be economically feasible for gun hunting.

      Bow however…

  5. Also, this is a good excuse to invest in a thermal scope (if you don’t already have one).

  6. I may have posted on this topic before on this site, but it’s rare (Heck, it’s unprecedented.) that I can use this slant on the story.

    After a career in chemical engineering I was a professor at a small, rural college for over a decade; it was such fun that I worked into my seventies.

    When there were reports just before the 2016 elections of students getting the vapors over a chalked “Trump” on the sidewalks I thought back to some of my students.

    One young lady asked me if I thought hot pink grips made her P226 look too girly. I opined that they were appropriate if they were sufficiently “grippy” and would enhance her aim.

    Another student occasionally came into a first period senior year class after a night of hunting hogs in the brush (I said it was a rural campus.) and spent the first few minutes of class getting rid of fleas if the hunt had gone well, as it usually did. This kid didn’t worry about whether a gun had been blooded; she (Yes, she. And she had been elected homecoming queen or some such thing as a junior.) hunted feral hogs with dogs and a very sharp knife.

    I’m not going to suggest that we Olde Pharttes should give up on rifles for hog hunting. I’m Irish by heritage and admire some of the sayings of the Irish philosopher Harry Callahan, particularly the most famous, “A man has to know his limitations”.

    1. Me mum’s side of the family hail from Hawaii. There was a dude on the big island who would train you venture out on your own with nothing but a big ass knife to take out feral swine. But only after lengthy disclaimers had been signed.

    2. We are at the top of the food chain because we can use rifles etc. instead of steel and muscle. In Prussia they used to hunt boar with lances, on horseback. Which is why there are so few Prussians left. (Well, that and WWI/WWII.)

      1. Methinks the dude on the big island catered to customers who were compensating for certain deficiencies. Always struck me epically stupid.

      1. Caithfidh fear a theorainneacha a fháil
        Don’t ask how that’s pronounced. Some say that whiskey was invented to keep the Irish from ruling the world, but I think that’s why he gave them their spelling conventions.

    1. Not long, I’m sure. I remember the view harridans getting the vapors when footage of Sara Palin surfaced, wherein she talked about culling wolves. With a RIFLE! From a HELICOPTER! Christ on a tampon. That there’s still a market for those rancid cows is surely one of the signs of the apocalypse.

  8. Wait, they can’t be worse than Californians. The ammo costs the same, but you get 60 cents for the non-Kosher pig meat, whereas, the cost for all those concrete swine shoes will drive me into the poor house.

    1. Part of this is that Texas laws as it relates to land owners and hunting is pretty strict. If you don’t have permission to hunt on the property, it escalates to felony real fast.

      The landowner who invites hunters has to know who they are and explicitly grant permission. And if you give them permission to hunt and they break the game laws, or do something stupid like “mistaking” a cow for a hog, you are on the hook too. Hunter shoots across the property line? That’s classified as “trespassing by projectile” and is another crime.

      That said, there are several areas in Texas state parks that are there for hunting. Just make sure you have a hunting license for that hunting area.

  10. Fun story making the rounds up here in PA.

    Not being native to PA, the feral hogs were not on the Game Commission’s list of regulated animals, and as such, could be hunted at will.

    Some tree hugging types wanted to save the poor hoggies, and spent, I’m told, something like $1.7mm in lawyers fees to get them onto the list, which they thought would save them. Reportedly, it took the game commissioner less than 72 hours to find that feral hogs were a foreign, destructive species, which could be hunted at will, subject to the requirement that you can’t just leave their dead carcasses all over the place, and that one may not carry in the field “out of season” weapons for the purpose of hog hunting, lest everyone and their brother carry center fire rifles during deer bow season.

  12. Kim, before you go on a pig hunt, you will have to get a hunting license and attend a “hunter education course” to get another piece of paper you have to carry and present showing you have it.

    The course will be useful, because you’ll get told about all the hunting regulations, and there are many.

  13. In Texas, if you were born after September 1, 1971 then you do have to have the $15 Hunter Education course, option, do it online for a total of $35 and it is a one time for the rest of your life thing. The Texas hunting license for a resident under 65 is $25 and over 65 it is $7. Being an old man I purchase the ‘Grand Slam’ which is every hunting and fishing option, all of the goodies for $35 each year. Every year it has becomes easier and easier to get my license at my local grocery store where the nice person on the service desk asks me if I want the same as last year, takes my driver’s license, asks me how many migratory birds I shot last year for my H.I.P. certification and in two minutes I have signed and paid for it and I am out the door. As stated above finding the place to shoot game can be difficult until you make friends with land owners who don’t mind having a friend cull a few deer each year or take out exotics like Axis deer and Aoudads and of course hogs which have no season or limit. I quit shooting deer about ten years ago because I did not like paying the processing fees and after doing one nice buck myself I decided my back could not handle that much butchering work. Now I just shoots birds and a nice one day guided dove hunt can start at $100 per gun and go up in nice areas like Abilene and Brownwood. Hunting game in Texas is not easy but making friends with guides and land owners and building relationships with folks who know what they are doing and have done it for years is worthwhile. Of course land owners who have had feeders up for a year and have their eye on a nice big rack buck that they have watched for several years are going to save that shot for themselves or their kids or charge a hefty fee for access to the deer lease and that’s Texas.

    I see a lot of exotics behind high fence within ten miles of where I live in the Hill Country including zebras and various African antelope and out of curiosity I just looked up hunting Cape Buffalo in Texas and found a $50,000 plus fee for taking a Cape Buffalo 60 miles from my house outside of Hondo, Texas. I think I would rather spend less and go to Africa where one of my neighbors took a nice Cape Buffalo about eight years ago and he said the price was reasonable, less than prices charged for trophy whitetail at some places in the USA.

  14. Kim, I hope you aren’t referring to that cute little .22 you showed a short while ago. It won’t cut the mustard with a wild boar. An angry boar is what we call in this country dangerous game.

  15. Oh look, another slur on all Californians.

    I’ve gotta admit the current crop in Kali are mostly a blight on humanity. However, before the devolution, there was the Golden State of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, John Wayne, Pete Wilson, George Patton, and even Pat Brown. Many of the citizens of that era, like your’s truly, have fled for more Constitutional pastures. Most are a credit to their new homes. I darest say that Florida became ever so slightly more conservative when I took up residence.

    Ask an ex-pat Californian; they can tell you of the evils of government unions and their political war chests, the absorption of the refuse from other parts of the country, the mono-culture mass media, the crimes of one-party rule, and the delusions of the lotus-eaters.

  16. I’ve thought about it, and no, there’s NOTHING worse than a California Liberal. Someone asked what Cali’s are going for? Ask around in any neighboring states, they wouldn’t give you two cents for them.

    1. Murphy,
      I’ve often said that a liberal progressive statist with an agenda is far more dangerous than any lunatic with a firearm. The liberal progressive statis with an agenda will destroy a generation or more.

      JQ

  17. I hunted Russian BOar in upstate NY about 18 years ago. $500 or so got you a guide, a pig and the pig was quartered. The guide field dressed and quartered the pig for each of us. 7 of us went, 6 for pigs one for some sort of goat or sheep. we all got our game except one person going for a boar.

    The boar meat was delicious.

    JQ

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