Pigs Gone Wild!

On a high bluff, we looked out over a dry field and there we black dots on it. Turkeys was the first thing that sprang to mind, but putting the binoculars on them revealed a bunch of pigs.

Feral Pigs, wild boars, or a few other choice names are used to describe pigs gone wild. Where they came from could not be answered for sure as there are no wild pigs in the Americas like there are in Europe.

European wild boar, or at least mixed (domestic) blood individual have been released in various states in the US over the years, but there are more and more feral pigs showing up in strange places.

Most show less “Wild Boar” and more “domesticated” influence in their appearance, but hogs are kind of a strange creature. Pure domestic bloodlines allowed to roam free in several generations will throw off their domesticated shackles and take on the appearance of wild stock (from whence they came originally of course).

Iowa is one of those “strange places” that feral hogs are starting to appear, a local boy working for the DNR has actually been trying to document their occurrence in Southern Iowa. He isn’t having much luck but they are for sure in some locations.

Where ever they are, most people (aside from a few hunters) do not welcome their appearance.

Hogs can breed several litters a year, and they have a habit of rooting up the ground. These two things in concert mean that they can soon overpopulate an area, and they destroy the very habitat they live on.

So, a friend and I found ourselves this March in Oklahoma doing our best to help out a few farmers and ranchers with their pig problems. There were rooted up areas in many locations and it was very clear that a farmer would not by happy with that.

We had made a connection with a local Oklahoma man with family ties in Iowa. Chad was a fine example of Oklahoma hospitality and was happy to have us come down and help control the pig population.

We saw pigs as soon as we hit the field. The group were a long ways off, but we soon wound our way down the bluff and closed the distance. At the edge of the field, we ran out of cover.

Did I mention this was Oklahoma? Apparently everything there has thorns or stickers on it which makes stalking through the short brush and grass a difficult thing as you just don’t go down on your hands and knees unless you want to spend a lot of time picking spines out of your hide. So crouching as low as possible and perhaps walking at bit like a duck was the modus operandi .

This is ranch country and cows were in the far pasture, and a rancher was traveling off in the distance, so we had to wait for the right moment before firing our rifles through a clear shooting lane, and in this time the pigs had traveled farther away. Our shots were misses and the pigs retreated out of sight.

Regaining the bluff, we were surprised to see the pigs had returned to the field! In a lot more time than it takes to tell, we managed to circle around them and approach from the direction they last retreated.

This time it worked better and our shooting was a bit more on target and we shot 4. The pigs turned out to be smaller than expected but our host was very happy to have 4 less of them in the field.

The landscape in West Oklahoma as already mentioned has lots of thorns and its quite dry. The isn’t much to the soil, basically sand and clay. There were lots of turkeys. They were in large flocks of 50 or more. Probably saw 300 turkeys a day along with a host of deer and 1 coyote.

We spent the next day sitting over likely spots, still hunting through likely cover and seeing only Dead Pigs. They were scattered somewhat at random over the landscape. Our host offered the opinion that the ranchers always carry a gun and must have been trying harder as of late to eliminate the problem. But later in the afternoon, we talked to one rancher and he told us that the DNR had flown a length of the river valley in a helicopter and shot over 60 of them.

When a DNR does something like that, they are taking the problem of pigs pretty seriously.

We finally sat out over a couple food plots as evening approached and pigs soon arrived at one of them that Chad was watching. He rounded up my friend and I and we were soon stalking the herd of pig through the brushy cover.

This time we were able through a bit of a rise in the landscape, to approach close and line up for the shot. The pigs left behind 4 more of their number.

We carved out the back straps and roasts from the hindquarters. I’m looking forward to a little wild pork chop as soon as I can get the grill fired up.

I must say pig hunting was just plain fun. We had lots of shooting, there were no worries as to “trophy size” which seems to occupy too much of my deer hunting, and I was able to shoot a few guns that don’t normally make the field.

There was no bag limit, license required, or season on these. Oklahoma is leaving the door wide open on its efforts to remove them.