#WildHogHunting #FreeMeat #Feeding50People
Well, it’s a great question! 🤔 The thing is, while hunting wild hogs can provide an abundance of free meat, there are a few reasons why not everyone is out there with their hunting gear ready. 🐗
First off, hunting wild hogs can be challenging. These animals are intelligent and elusive, making it a difficult task to track and hunt them. 🌲 Plus, wild hogs can be aggressive, so it requires a certain level of skill and caution to safely hunt them.
Another reason is that not everyone has access to the necessary resources for hunting, such as land to hunt on, hunting equipment, and the know-how to properly handle and process the meat. 🏹🔪
Additionally, some people may not be aware of the abundance of wild hogs in the USA and the benefits of hunting them. By spreading awareness and educating others about the opportunity to harvest free meat, more people may be inclined to participate in wild hog hunting. 📣
So, while the idea of hunting wild hogs and providing free meat for 50 people sounds amazing, there are definitely some challenges and barriers that prevent everyone from taking part. But for those who have the means and skills, wild hog hunting can be a rewarding and beneficial activity. 🍖👍
It would make sense, it can you imagine trying to hunt 9 million hogs – The man power and resources
Hunting is hard and hogs are dangerous.
Probably because they don’t want to hunt wild hogs.
They’re flippin’ dangerous, they move in big packs, and they’re smarter than you’d expect. It’s just not worth the cost of supplies needed to hunt that type of game vs the same cost going to a grocery store unless you already know how to hunt and how to prepare and process a kill. Some people absolutely do hunt them, though.
You also can’t really hunt them in the places where they are. Feral pigs will happily range on private property and you can’t hunt anything on someone else’s farmland.
They aren’t close to where most people live. Most people wouldn’t have the space to store that much meat at once. Most people would not know how to process the carcass. Some people are uncomfortable with the idea of hunting.
Personally, there are no hogs near me. I also highly doubt a single wild hog could feed that many people. There’s also a huge skill and ability gap because you have to know how to hunt and how to process the meat.
For starters, most people live in cites. Hogs tend to stay away from population centers.
Additionally, people are accustomed to buying food from the market so a lot of people, even if they could shoot/trap/catch one, wouldn’t be able to properly clean it.
It’s a lot of work to dress an animal and prepare it as a meal.
Wild pigs are omnivores and carry diseases. Might not be safe to eat unless you can get the meat tested.
What I want to know is, who counted these hogs?
Only 9 mil? That seems low.
Tons of worms and parasites in hog meat, there’s a reason a number of religions have banned pork since ancient times without modern antibiotics.
Its not “Free to hunt them” in many places. California still needs a permit, and in recent years, made them expensive.
Texas, is mostly private property, so you need permissions from the landowner.
Then you need to be a hunter. You need a gun, ammo, truck, and you need to know how to process a hog carcass. You also need to be able to haul a 500 lb carcass out of the woods with something, likely a quad or 4×4 which requires money, and somewhere to keep it when not using it. Again, money. You also need to know how to hunt what can be a dangerous animal, and then you need free time to do it. So a lot of training.
Consider that most of the hogs aren’t near populated areas, you need to basically go on an expedition. Again, you need a truck that burns expensive fuel.
So, its nowhere close to “free”.
All of OP’s responses suggest that he really don’t grasp just how difficult hunting is. The hogs aren’t contained in some small area. They are roaming thousands of acres. You have to find them and then manage to shoot them. In order to do that you need an appropriate rifle and adequate skill (meaning you take whatever required courses your states require for a hunting license), pay for the required hunting license, pay to go to the range to learn adequate accuracy to shoot. You need the equipment to field dress a very large and heavy animal, and the ability to transport it out of wherever you are (either a truck or a ATV of some sort). You then either need to butcher and process it yourself, or pay a processer to do it (which costs about what you pay for pork in the grocery store anyhow). You need a freezer to store the processed meat. You have to have the time to sit around/track and/or wait for a pig to show up in whatever area you are hunting – which could take days. The hogs are living in large swamps and forested areas.
I am not a hunter – but my ex-partner was and the amount of time, money, practice, and effort that went into getting an animal was A LOT.
More info: https://www.hogmanoutdoors.com/blog/hog-hunting-tips-for-beginners#:~:text=From%20a%20downwind%20position%2C%20call,distance%20when%20using%20this%20method.
Northern California here,(real northern California) north of Sacramento. No hogs in my neck of the woods but over in the valley they are all over and are very tasty. Never really heard of them being full of parasites,or disease. Not gamey at all. Mostly they feed on foothill acorns and roots. Ranchers are always looking to get them off their place.
I thought about hunting them until I checked on cleaning them. Everything I read started with “do not get any of their body fluids on you.” I also learned some big words like leptospirosis, toxoplasmosis, brucellosis, tularemia, trichinellosis, swine influenza, salmonella, hepatitis and pathogenic E. coli.
I live in east Texas. I typically shoot or trap one or two hogs a year to process. We kill more, but we usually just process a sow or two. They’re typically way smaller than people here are describing, there are monstrosities running around from time to time, but most of what we get is small enough to lift into the truck myself. As long as you don’t hit a scent gland when processing they taste good. You hit that gland and best to just dump it. We have lots of oaks so their diet is mostly acorns and corn from deer feeders. I personally like the ones from my neighbors land that is covered in beech trees, when those trees producing the pigs are extra tasty. They definitely don’t feed fifty people, but I know people who will put out a big corral trap and get a whole bunch at once, then friends / family will come and take one to butcher. Before deer season people tend to just shoot them to keep them from eating their deer corn, but later in the winter people will process some to eat.
The amount of misinformation I recognize when I actually know about a topic makes me so scared for the answers I trust on topics of which I am unaware.
I hunt wild hogs for a living, in one of the only USDA approved Wild Boar handling facilities in the United States. 40 hours per week with my trusty canine coworker 🐶 the answer to this question is that we’re working on it! The meat is incredibly healthy (blood red in color vs traditional almost skin colored pork that has been drained of nutrients and filled with water) in the United States alone, any pork you buy at Walmart is allowed legally to be up to 30% saline-water injection. Lots of shrinkage when cooking plus the obvious dice roll involved in eating that shit, not to mention inflated prices from paying $3/lb that’s really 4/lb after you remove the water. We are growing rapidly in the amount of orders we process and are expanding into single
-customer order processing capabilities. Currently we ship to high end fine dining restaurants mostly. The meat does NOT have a gamey taste, you & grandma just can’t cook. We have world class chefs come in and prepare wild boar for us and it is some of the most high quality meat in the world. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have Michelin star chefs walking around our property overjoyed at the meat quality they are seeing. The meat quality is phenomenal.
The main reason I see that we don’t consume them much as a nation is because 300 million Americans don’t know how to clean their own meat and Big Beef / Big Pork would never let it happen. We have to jump through continuous hoops to ensure a safe product considering we can’t guarantee it’s history before we caught it and moved it to our ranch. Which is funny to me, considering that all food was inherently wild up until like 100 years ago. Just tactics employed by lobbyists for big meat to stop the little guy from evading their ridiculous packaging costs
Even if they were nearby, you think I’ve got the time and energy to go out hunting for my meal, cleaning and carving the body, finding space to store it in and then cook it? I’m too busy wage-slaving so I don’t die. Also, I saw what a boar did to Bobby B, I’m not going out like that hunting hairy pigs in the woods.
Most people are too disconnected from where food comes from to even fathom doing this.
Texan here in an area where there are a lot of hogs. There is a lot of private property here, so you have to get permission to hunt just about everywhere. Some even charge to let people essentially get rid of pests for them (?). The hogs are smart, and they know to go where the people aren’t. I’ve been on a hog hunt before, and we used “hog dogs.” 3 or 4 smell the hogs and chase them down, and then one, usually a pit bull or something, bites the hog and doesn’t let go until you come up and stab the hog. It’s not super humane, but that’s how it’s done. The dogs are pretty rare and you can hunt without them, but it’s easier with the dogs. I had a friend with his own dogs who hunted them professionally. I think he “hunts” cougars for wildlife biologists now by shooting them with sedative and tagging them. He had a few stories about getting attacked by hogs. He said that once, a hog ran at him and he had time to pull a shotgun and shoot the thing when it was a few feet away. he fell on his butt and ended up with a dead hog between his legs. Deer won’t do that – generally – but don’t corner one to find out. Also, a lot of people won’t eat the meat since they have a lot of parasites that can be passed on to humans.
The short answer – they aren’t tame and most people don’t have the resources or desire to hunt them.
* they’re not just everywhere
* 50 people is a bit of a stretch
* they often travel in packs
* they’re capable of killing you back