How do Ferrell Hogs taste?

[Dive Bar Casanova]

Wife was watching You Tube Shorts and some Ferrell Hog trapping videos pop'd up.
Anyone cook these?
Good, bad, does it depend on where they feed?

Would leaving caches' of fruit in the wild to eat make them like Kalua Pig flavor? Or is that too ambitious?
Or,, forget it?

If anyone has experience with this it's going to be in this forum.

Thanks for any takes and tales.

 

[JIMSMOKES]

If it's anything like bear. Terrible!

 

[Dive Bar Casanova]

If it's anything like bear. Terrible!

I 100% agree with you. Ahhhhh, bear is a taste one never forgets.

 

[Dive Bar Casanova]

I remember when I was a kid we'd watch the Bill Burred travel show on TV.
He was in Texas and they used a Thompson Sub machine gun on the attacking wild hogs.
Us kids thought that sooo cool.

 

[TNJAKE]

indaswamp is your guy for this question

 

[indaswamp]

For the past 12 years or so, I have been given wild hogs every winter. Usually get 3-4....but did not have any given to me this past winter. I think the massive drought had a lot to do with it. Anyway, yes, what they eat has a lot to do with how they are for the table. I much prefer smaller hogs 100# and smaller. Ideal size is about 80#. Enough meat to justify the work cleaning, and still small enough so that the meat is really good. Winter/early spring yields the best flavored meat. Lots of mast crops, ag field residue, and new spring shoots. Summer they eat a lot of grubs, insects and other nasty stuff. Fall, they are still cleaning out but are good by winter. Best thing to do is to take a small piece of fat off the hog and fry it in a pan...smell it... if it is off, you will smell it. Most times I will leave the fat on the meat, but after frying, if it is off and tainted, we remove the fat and keep only the lean. Rarely have to do this with hogs 100# and smaller....

 

[cptnding]

It definitely depends on what they are eating. We have lots of feral hogs here in GA. To the point of being a nuisance animal. At this point they are open season all year long with no limit if that tells you anything.
The ones that come out of the soybean and corn fields are decent. The ones that come out of the woods in north GA are nasty.
I used to go fishing with an old boy down in Florida who was a swamp rat and hunted them with dogs. They would focus on the young ones and capture them live. Then put them in a pen and finish them out with regular hog feed. Those were excellent.

 

[indaswamp]

Wish I could trap them to feed them out...but it is illegal to transport live wild hogs here in Louisiana. Too many people were relocating them closer to home to run their dogs so they made it illegal....stiff fine too...

 

[pineywoods]

As has been said it depends on what they have been feeding on. It also depends a lot on how the animal has been handled and processed. We used to trap a lot of hogs and move them to pens to feed for awhile before killing them. We cut the boar hogs. Most wild hogs will also have worms so we'd feed a medicated hog feed. Much of Florida has been over run with wild hogs since I was a kid. In Florida any hogs on private land are considered the owners property to do whatever they want with them. Hunt or trap them any time any way desired no limits on size or number or anything else with them. People would actually pay us to hunt pigs on their property, pigs rooting up people's nice perfect lawn is usually frowned upon by the homeowners. lol We'd have whole neighborhoods begging us to kill them for them. There was a group of about six of us that had been friends most of our lives and hunted and fished together that were called upon to get rid of them.

Wish I could trap them to feed them out...but it is illegal to transport live wild hogs here in Louisiana. Too many people were relocating them closer to home to run their dogs so they made it illegal....stiff fine too...

Keith they stopped it over here as well. Of course they can't do anything about it if you don't leave the property you trapped them on. Or at least here they can't

 

[Chris_in_SoCal]

I use to hunt wild boar in central California. They mostly eat acorns. They are also a nuisance but the locals would charge us from the south to hunt them. They did do the processing and room and board so it evened out.

The one thing I did not enjoy was that almost all the meals while there were made from the boar that other hunters did not want to take home. At first it was strong and different but after a while you grew sick of the overpowering taste of the gamey meat verses what you would normally get in a store.

I took down a few wild boar with a 30-06 I inherited from my grandpa but the only meat I could eat was sausages and chili. The rest was way to strong for my taste buds.

It was fun since my dad was a retired LAPD police officer and it was a huge gathering with all his friends and the sons of them which I was one of.

I can't seem to find a pic of me taking down a boar but here is me playing with a 50 cal. at the ranch.

 

[okie sawbones]

My one experience with feral hog meat was nasty. Never willing to try it again.

 

[tallbm]

Wife was watching You Tube Shorts and some Ferrell Hog trapping videos pop'd up.
Anyone cook these?
Good, bad, does it depend on where they feed?

Would leaving caches' of fruit in the wild to eat make them like Kalua Pig flavor? Or is that too ambitious?
Or,, forget it?

If anyone has experience with this it's going to be in this forum.

Thanks for any takes and tales.

I shoot em and eat em every year I can.

In Central and North Texas areas I hunt they have lots of acorns and deer feeder corn and natural or farm grown good stuff they eat on so I don't think they are ever just scrounging for the bottom of the barrel scraps. Plus, I take them in the Fall or Winter time. They go nocturnal when it heats up and it's too hot to be hunting in the Summer which is most of the year here lol.

I agree with what indaswamp mentions.
I do different where I have never had a bad one, big or small. I've had some musky boars that didn't smell great when dropped but once they were dressed and skinned, there was no stink to the meat or fat. Those big guys get turned into all ground except the ribs.

The little ones like 80lbs and under are great but I try to get at least 180lbs or so for it to be worth my time to fool with them and I may only get 1 or 2 as an opportunity while deer hunting so I try to go for more meat. Again, the places I hunt are going to have good available food sources so that really helps out.

I can tell you that countless times I run across other hunters or even people at managed land ranches that are like "we hear they are nothing but nasty and leave the bigger ones or we just go throw them in the bone pit for the coyotes and buzzards after we drop em".
We then drop a few, skin, em and these guys are like "they don't smell bad skinned" and then we break out last year's feral hog sausage or food and they eat it and are like "OMG we have to go out and get a pig!!!" hahahhaah.
It becomes a full on mission for them all to try and shoot a feral hog and THAT is when none come out hahahhaha.

So I guess the answer is that it varies and is based on where, when, and what the hogs are eating on.

As for taste. Mine taste AMAZING. I describe it like this.
Feral hog meat is to dark chicken meat as
Farmed hog meat is to white chicken meat.

I've only ever had 1 pig that had a bunch of fat on it, like 3 inches! Likely a farm raised that got out and went feral. All the rest have been so fat lean (still lots of muscle/meat) that there was no considerable fat on them and when they do have fat I keep it on it unless it would be smelly. So removing fat is usually not even an option, especially on every smaller hog I've ever shot.

One last note. Best bullet placement on a feral hog to me is an earhole shot. Like following along eye height and going towards the ear. If you wiggle left or right you hit from eye to base of skull or neck and they drop. You don't want to be tracking a pissed off wounded feral hog to find out it's still up and angry so a drop right there bullet placement is great lol.
The other nice thing about this is that you would minimize/eliminate the amount of lead you may be eating with that kind of shot, if that's ever of any concern for you.

I switched to non-lead bullets many years ago since I fill the freezer with about 150-180 pounds of game meat each year. I figure I better start avoiding the eating of lead dust/particles and the non-lead Barnes bullets I load are freaking accurate as hell once I dial them in with my handloads AND they retain almost all of their weight all the time with amazing expansion and shock/force delivery!!!! (Hornady GMX.... are a pain in the ass to deal with, I recommend Barnes).
I also have an unlikely fantasy that I would like to be able to hunt in California if the situation ever arose or should the laws changed around here to go non-lead. I'm not sure they have anything we don't have here that I would hunt and eat but that's the "efficiency" bug in me making sure I'm good to go no matter the situation :D

I hope this info helps :D

 

[HalfSmoked]

I have for 10 years driven Amish to Florida and they pig hunt over near lake Okeechobee,
and I have enjoyed many wild hog dinners. As goes another comment Bear meat to me is as great as any other meat. Chef Jimmy J give me credit for cooking the best burger of any kind he ever had, and it was bear meat.

Warren