Hunting wild boar has a proud tradition in Europe, but in the U.S., where they’ve been introduced or escaped from farms, Sus scrofa is non grata due to damage they cause. Here’s how to pursue them. Posted on 09/11/2019 4:59:00 AM PDT by w1n1
Hunting wild boar has a proud tradition in Europe, but in the U.S., where they’ve been introduced or escaped from farms, Sus scrofa is non grata due to damage they cause. Here’s how to pursue them.
Hunting the wild hog is a tradition as old as man himself. In Europe the wild boar was considered a worthy opponent for heroic warriors who faced him with sword and spear. Throughout the centuries, many men were killed, as the European wild boar is a brave and savage animal that can fight unflinchingly to the death.
Often he will disdain to squeal or cry out even if mortally wounded as he fights to the bitter end. If cornered by dogs, he normally will shake them off and charge the first man on the scene. Only death will stop him. That is why boar spears have a short, thick, wood crossbar lashed to the shaft behind the massive spearhead used on them. That is to prevent the boar from running up the spear shaft to get at the man at the other end.
These boar spears are heavier-bladed and thicker-shafted than the ones used on men in wartime, as they want to inflict the maximum amount of damage and bleeding to the quarry and the shaft must not break, no matter how much the stricken boar pushes the hunter on the other end around.
If that shaft breaks, the boar is on the hunter in a heartbeat and only quick skillful use of a sword can save the hunter then. When a boar bites a man, he takes out a plug as clean as a cookie cutter in dough, and those big jaws take out a big plug. A single bite has often proved fatal over the centuries.
In past times, men sometimes wore their armor when fighting wolves, boars and bears with spear and sword –a very smart move that greatly increased their life expectancy. This tradition of hunting boars with cold steel has never died out in Germany, where boar spears are still made and used in the dark primeval forests by hunters adhering to the old heroic ideals of the hunt. This is as thrilling as dangerous game hunting gets.
WHILE THE EUROPEAN wild boar (often called the Russian wild boar in the U.S.) is the ancestor of your domestic pig, it is a much smarter, stronger and fiercer beast. It is a lean animal with razor-sharp tusks extending 3 to 6 inches that slash out quickly, propelled by the powerful shoulders and low hindquarters.
They can run as fast as a deer and they can easily weigh from 350 to 600 pounds. They often will turn on dogs intent on pursuing them, instead of running. Forty percent casualties among the dogs is common. While this seems unnecessarily cruel to the dogs, these nocturnal animals can be difficult to hunt without them.
What a herd of wild hogs can do to a farmer’s crops is a lot more cruel, as is what they may do to the farmer’s children or the farmer himself, for a wild boar with a sow and piglets is very prone to attack on sight. They rank with the old man-eating European wolf and the European brown bear (which is identical to the American grizzly bear) as Europe’s most dangerous big game animal and there is a long line of graves dating back to the Stone Age backing up that rating.
In terms of the number of people that they have killed down through the ages, they rank behind the European wolf (a much deadlier animal than his North American counterpart) and ahead of the European brown bear, which is normally not a man-eater like the European wolf is and the bears are not as mean and vicious as the wild boar.
This savage animal was imported from Germany’s Black Forest to the game preserve of Austin Corbin in New Hampshire in the 1890s. The Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee got three stocking punches. A man named Barnes imported some from the Schwarzwald around the turn of the century and two North Carolina brothers brought some breeding pairs in from Russia after World War I. An Englishman named George Moore established a hunting preserve in North Carolina and brought in his group in 1910. As any farmer could have told these folks, you can’t keep a hog in with a fence and you can’t keep a fence up in the woods with all the trees falling on it.
The hogs soon spread out into the Smoky Mountains, where they quickly earned a reputation as the most dangerous animals in the woods. They have even killed black bears that tried to prey on them. Read the rest of feral peril.
All we need to do is tell the Chinese that feral pigs are an aphrodisiac. They’ll be hunted to extinction in no time.
“In Georgia its open season 24/7. We are loaded with pigs.”
I’m jealous of the guys who hunt boar from choppers.
I like using my Cetme’ .308 for hog hunting where I live.
Packs a punch.
I live on a private air park and it is dangerous as they tear up the runway and taxi ways.
Also do great damage to ones yard.
Officials say that from here to Palm Beach county there are over a million of them living and tearing things up.
Have captured up to 8 at one time in a trap but then what to do with them?
Better to shoot em and leave em for the buzzards.
Have seen em up to 600 pounds,,
Often look just like Rosie O’donnell.
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