How many of you have ACTUALLY been hog hunting?

[ChanceMcCall]

O.K. I've only hunted hogs once, 40 years ago in Northeastern Tennessee. Three of us came down from Illinois with 44 magnums looking for the fabled Russian boars that were running loose in the mountains. The idea was to go for something dangerous that would hunt you back given the chance. Since these animals were reputed to kill black bears regularly this seemed like great fun that was still legal.

I had, years earlier than that, hunted the "Big Seven" in Africa, Polar Bears and Kodiak Bears in Alaska, but most of that had become out of bounds. One of the guys with me had never hunted anything but birds and the other only the usual birds, deer, and elk. They were anxious to face dangerous game.

Now I had been raised on a farm, and while we didn't raise hogs, all of our neighbors did. Domestic hogs are not terribly exciting, and even their feral cousins were mostly nuisances that we killed on sight with primarily .22 rifles. So, the tales of the Russians with their bullet proof gristle plates and aggressive natures seemed perfect. Certainly far better than the mountain lions I had hunted that proved a real disappointment regarding fear factor hunting.

So, we packed up my brand new pickup truck and headed to Tennessee. As it turned out the truck gave us a real adventure by breaking down in middle Tennessee which allowed me to make a new friend in the Service Manager of a dealership. He turned out to be an avid deer hunter who worked at the dealership as a cover for his real occupation - moonshiner. He had some of the finest stainless steel tanks on his farm turning out some very clean and very good shine in prodigious quantities. That new friendship lasted for years until his death a few years ago, so that was the really fortuitous event in the trip.

When we get where we were going the hired guides regaled us with stories of these dangerous Russian boars, and evidencing skepticism about our using revolvers on these formidable beasts. They warned us to keep up as best we could with the dogs as we were going to have to pay for any dogs the boars killed or maimed if we weren't right there to protect them. They also warned us to look for good trees to climb if we missed or our guns didn't do the job. Naturally we were pumped and the bird hunter didn't even sleep that night because of both fear and anticipation.

As it turned out, he did get charged, but only because the boar was cornered and the only way out was through a tunnel in a thicket that he was crawling through. He did get the thrill of being hunted back, but the handgun lessons I had given him paid off and the boar went down about four feet in front of his face. He was prone as he was crawling through a thicket using a creek bed as the entrance. He had a good story which he still tells to this day.

Myself and the other guy following our dogs came right up on our boars fighting with the dogs. Anticlimactic as it was, both of us killed our boars with a single shot. Not really so much fun.

Now. The boars were large, and they were very, very, hairy compared to any hog I had ever seen. Their tusks were huge. They certainly looked the part of a fearsome beast. However, it wasn't what we were hoping for. To top it off, the meat was terrible and smelled to high heaven when cooked. (Of course, I should have expected that as a farm boy. They were scrounging for food and they had not been castrated at all, let alone early.)

So, we never had any urge to do it again. 

Edited March 7, 2019 by ChanceMcCall
word correction