Learning to Hunt
To be a real country boy prepper, you need to know how to hunt. Having lived all my life in relatively urban to suburban areas, hunting is not something I grew up with, or have done until recently. Clearly this is a hole in my education that I need to fix.
Back in the People’s Republic of New Jersey (PRNJ), population density, and an anti-gun culture, interferes with hunting of any type. As a result, the place is over populated with deer and bears. Here in South Carolina, the prevailing culture favors both guns and hunting, so it is time to learn.
What to hunt?
The immediate first question is what to hunt? If you go for deer, you have to deal with all the normal rules around hunting. A class might be in order, licenses, etc. Deer tags are required, etc. Then there is the problem of my wife thinks deer are cute. ☹
PRNJ Bear checking for snacks
About this time, PRNJ, which is overrun with black bears, decided not to have a bear hunt again this year. Watching a bear stroll through your yard, while the dog is barking like crazy and wants to go outside and play with it, raises mixed feelings about the desirability of thinning out the bear population. I have no plans to hunt bears, but it is nice to know that if somebody wants to hunt bears around here, they can.
Feral Hogs
However, feral hogs are “fair game”. These animals produce a lot of meat, cause a lot of destruction, and the only rules are basic gun safety. Hogs reproduce at an astounding rate. They are an invasive species.
Left alone, the population will triple annually. If you kill 70% of them annually, the population will hold steady. Areas where they are prevalent are perfectly happy to have you remove as many as you can. No one has figured out how to eliminate them, or stop them from spreading.
They are now in 39 states and spreading. They are edible! No one thinks they are cute.
I have a cousin who is a long-time hunter from upstate New York, recently retired to the south, who has a bum shoulder from avoiding safe moving chores, who hunts. In upstate New York there weren’t feral hogs, but now that he has retired south, he has decided hogs are tasty.
As a result, I have someone who can teach me about hunting in general, and hog hunting in particular. He has harvested several hogs and is overwhelmed with sausage, which is encouraging, even though I am more of a bacon guy myself. 😊
Hunting Firearms
The non-gun world seems to think there is a difference between “hunting firearms” and “military style firearms”. They obviously are unfamiliar with feral hogs! One of the problems with feral hogs is that they may decide to charge you and they can weigh hundreds of pounds. They dislike being shot at and have a thick layer of cartilage draped over their backs which provides a natural armor.
Even when you ignore these issues, the hogs tend to be in groups and if you’re going to solve the overpopulation problem you need to shoot more than one. If the population is tripling every year and if you see a group of 30 and shoot one, what have you really achieved? Next year there will be 87 instead of 90.
Shooting Porkers
To hunt hogs, you need a firearm, preferably a semi-automatic rifle. Much of the hunting is done at night at relatively short range, i.e. less than 100 yards.
My cousin decided that the best rifle for him was an AR-15 chambered in .300 Blackout. I don’t have one of those, but I do have an AR-10 in .308. I decided that was what I would use on pigs, at least initially. However, I still needed a night optic. I acquired a lower end thermal scope to mount on my AR-10 and headed for my cousin’s home.
The two of us mounted the scope (okay mostly him) and we zeroed it in on his backyard range, using a hand warmer for a thermal heat source. My cousin is a pretty good shot, even if his safe moving skill is limited, and he was hitting dead center of the hand warmer pretty quick. I was hitting close enough that at least I wouldn’t miss something the size of a hog. 😊
I realized that my night optic would be useless during the day, so I acquired a day optic and put it on another AR-10 upper. I was now equipped for day or night hunting of feral hogs, or other large game.
The Season
My cousin and I then went to a hunting camp for boar hunters. Think of a dude ranch for wild pigs. 😊 The place is run by one fellow who acquires a lot of hunting leases and then charges hunters to hunt, provides a bunkhouse, and cleans, skins and quarters the hogs.
He drives us out in the boonies. I am totally lost, but he sets me up in a stand in the late afternoon to wait for animals to show up. My cousin is taken someplace else, so I am left alone to conduct war on pigs. Two deer show up, but I don’t have any deer tags and I want a hog!
It becomes dark and I really can’t see anything, so I look through my thermal scope and see a group of five deer! Cool! My thermal scope works. I look around some more and start to see raccoons, but I don’t want a raccoon. Is there such a thing as raccoon season? Leave your comments below. 😊 Finally, a group of three pigs show up. The thermal scope provides a rather flat image, so I examine the hogs for a while to figure out which one is largest. I shoot the hog and it drops! That was easy. I drop the mag from my “weapon of war” and place a call to get picked up.
Frustration
I then look back through my scope, and the pig has gotten up and left! I hit that thing with a .308 and it didn’t stay down! When my ride arrives, we look all over, but no pig. My cousin bags one hog. Our guide cleans, skins, and quarters the hog, which happily does not gross me out. Of course, he is doing all the work and I am a mere spectator. I realize I have none of the tools to properly butcher a hog.
The next morning, I get dropped at the same spot and see absolutely nothing. My cousin gets another hog. That afternoon, my pig dude ranch guide sets me up in another spot with a blind. It gets dark and I can’t see anything. About 7:00pm a group of hogs shows up.
I finally have something that registers in the thermal, so I pick out a large hog and shoot it. This time I am going to watch, so I can be sure the hog is not going to wander off. I see my hog twitching, so I shoot it again, and it now appears to be unlikely to wander away.
I take out my cell phone to call my ride and realize I am in an area with no signal. I wind up waiting until my guide shows up to check on me, with my cousin, who has shot another hog, . . . in the dark. My hog weighs in at 175lbs. Despite this experience, it is clearly less expensive to buy pork at the grocery store like everybody else.
Maybe raccoon next time?