never killed but eaten a few times. I am spoiled on nice juicy pen fed hogs. They were a dryer and a little gamy. Like the difference between feed lot beef and range beef. that was my limited experience

A friend of ours gave us some bacon made from a wild hog. I appreciated his kindness but really didn't care for its flavor. One bite was all it took for me to decide I didn't like it. I don't like game meat, so that could be why wild hog meat doesn't appeal to me. I do like well-fed and properly managed grass-fed beef though.

The Noble Foundation says Love County has more wild hogs than any other county in OK, which I find to be depressing news. We have them on our property sporadically, particularly at the very back of the property, which is about 800' from the house and separated from the house by dense, overgrown woodland. The closerst they've ever come to the house is about 150' and they were just sort of occupying a mud hole in our creek (it was drought and the rest of the creek and all the ponds had dried up) for a few days. They will dig around and root up all the soil and make it impossible for anything to grow (you likely know that already) so people here trap them and shoot them whenever they can. And, in fact, it is very difficult to walk through an area they've torn up because it is so filled with the big holes they dig. Not many folks that we know here will eat them because wild hogs are known to carry some pretty nasty diseases.

A herd of wild hogs is dangerous and can run down and hurt or kill a human. A local rancher had a very close call with them a couple of years ago. If he hadn't made it back to his ATV and climbed up on it, he likely would have been badly injured or worse, and he thought they were going to get him before he made it back to his ATV. I cannot even imagine how frightening that experience was for him.

Whatever you do, don't let them establish on your property. They reproduce so incredible quickly that a couple of hogs becomes dozens of hogs in pretty much no time at all.

The Noble Foundation, based in Ardmore, has developed a BoarBuster trap that is incredible. It will trap most or all of a herd at one time. It is quite technologically advanced compared to the old box type traps used before.

The Noble Foundation's BoarBuster Trap

I watched that trap operate in a video, and it really does work. I don't like wild meat either Dawn. Al has hunted and eaten the hogs, he laughed and said, "Well, it's a little better smoked." I think that was a .....don't bother.

I have seen the drop traps demonstrated at the pecan conferences.

I will start carrying when I do my walks through the brush areas.

I expected you'd start carrying now that you have them there. It is the hardest thing for me to carry a weapon around our place with the knowledge I might have to use it, but I'd rather have it with me and not ever need it (hopefully) than to need it and not have it. I'd like to live in peace and harmony with all wildlife, but that only works if the wild things feel the same way, and often they do not.

The wildlife, in terms of predators, is the worst it has been here close to the house since 2008. I suspect the November and December river, creek and pond flooding pushed more wildlife up out of the bottom lands again and onto higher ground like ours. Coyotes and bobcats are awful this year and are all over in great numbers, and out more in broad daylight than usual. I haven't seen a feral hog in about 6 weeks now, so I hope that is a good sign. We have seen a lot of suspicious animal tracks this week (sigh) and I need to go out there with a good nature guide and try to figure out what they belong too. I know they aren't coyote. Beyond that, it is hard to guess, but they are following deer trails. I hope they are just feral dogs.

Sows and young pigs should taste all right but the boars get pretty gamy. That's because 'pen raised' male hogs are usually castrated while young. This is true for all swine. I have eaten some wild pork that I thought tasted good.

We started fighting wild hogs about five years ago. They can destroy a corn crop overnight. A young man from Shawnee comes in with dogs and hunts them for us. They are so fast and mean I would never be able to get away from them, so I stay far away and let the young ones chase them. We made our own traps out of wire panels and they worked very well. I don't know what guns you are carrying but it has to be an impressive piece to stop a wild hog. Never ate one but I don't think it would be very good.

i haven't seen a lot of wildlife this winter but the coyotes have really been loud late in the evenings. When I take my dogs out for last call about 10:00pm they are yapping and howling like crazy.

The drop traps are nice, but very pricey. Even a corral type can cost a few hundred. That's if you build them yourself.

If you happen to be around the Shawnee area, I have a portable trap that can be hauled in the back of a pickup.

We have them around here for sure. One of my neighbors says the back of his property looks like it's been rototilled. He was out there, with a friend (both teens) looking for them, and a 300 lb boar charged him. He emptied 16 22 long rifle bullets into that hog. But it just kept coming. There wasn't a large enough tree to climb, so he ran up a hill. But it did catch him by the foot. Thankfully his dog intervened and held it at bay until it died of its wounds. Being a young cowboy... he refused to go to the doctor, but took his dog to the vet.

We haven't had them on our place. I believe this is primarily because we have three livestock guardian dogs who run them off.

We have had wild hog meat when it was superb and when it was not so good. I wouldn't bother with a boar. But some of the little ones and sows are good. A fellow I met at Bass Pro told me that he hunts them all the time. He says when he kills a hog he can tell if it'll be good or not by the smell of the blood. If the blood smells bad, he won't use it.

George

I always have a shotgun with me during the late summer and fall to kill squirrels, but it is not much good for coyotes and hogs. I'd prefer to stay out of shotgun range at least.

The flood waters are down so I will likely explore some of the woods this week. It will be interesting.

George,

Your young cowboy friends sounds exactly like my old cowboy friends....they take care of the dog, horse, cow, etc.....and then they do not worry about themselves. The code of the Old West. I'm glad he and the dog were okay. And, for my old cowboy friends, they get away with putting the animals first and themselves last until they finally break a hip while being thrown off a horse or something, and then their adult kids get involved and "make" dad take care of himself too. That's not a bad thing.

Normally, while walking my dog down a quiet country road on a leash, I do not run into feral hogs out in the road, for which I am grateful. At times, there are trees big enough for me to climb, but at other times there are absolutely no trees around. However, at night, we've had hogs run right out into the road while driving by. I'm always grateful that hasn't happened while walking though, and I do ponder what I would do on such an occasion. A couple of times, we have encountered hogs while walking but the hogs were inside a pasture enclosed by a barbed wire or electric fence and we were outide of that pasture. It made me extremely uneasy to know those weak-looking fences were all that stood between the hogs and us. I suspect neither barbed wire not a hot wire would stop a feral hog if it chose to come after us. They can be very vicious.

Scott, Be careful! There's no telling what the flood waters drove up into your woods. You might find Bigfoot.

Over in Cass County, TX, which is a long way east and slightly south of me, there's been reports of a white ghost "cat" that many think is an albino cougar, especially since some livestock has gone missing. Have you seen the news story on that? I thought of you when I read it. I'd rather see a cougar (as a point of interest, not because I want for them to be here where we live) in the wild than see a feral hog. Oh, and anytime I see a feral hog in the wild, it still shocks me so much that I pretty much freeze in place and stare. You can see hogs anywhere around here, though, but true cougar sightings are a lot more rare. I stared at the video of the white ghost "cat" a long time, and couldn't decide what I believe it is. There is something a bit unsettling about its walk. I wish the quality of the video were better, but it is cell phone video taken from quite a distance, so the quality is poor. I also wish we had something else of a size we "know" in that video and in the screenshots from it that would help us judge accurately the size of the white creature in the video.

I love seeing wildlife out in the wild, but I'll qualify that by saying that I do not consider my fenced garden or our front yard to be the wild.

Oklahoma has an amazing diversity of wildlife and I think that's part of why we love living here.

Dawn

Story About the East Texas "White Ghost Cat"

Dawn, watched the video it sure walks like a cougar and the tail is long like a cougar. Well, I am a believer.

so that's where Bigfoot is, Scott's place. That's a relief to finally know for sure!! Ha ha

I found the remains of a feral pig a couple of days ago and it appears to be the one seen alive a few days before. I could find no evidence of any others being around our place. I'm optimistic that they will not establish permanently on our land.

On a side note, I am wondering if the winter flood might have killed off most of the groundhogs that we have. A few remaining dozer piles that they occupy might have stayed above the water level, but all tunnels were flooded while they were "hibernating".

The video looked like a mountain lion until the point it walked 6 or 8 steps. The steps were much too quick for any mountain lion video I have seen. Then you can look back to the jump and see that it looks like a much smaller animal than a grown mountain lion. And lastly, if it was a mountain lion it would not be hanging around one county for a couple months. I'm guessing it is a large regular cat.

Initially when I first watched the video, I thought it was a young mountain lion, but the mountain lions I've seen here (only 5 over all our years here, and only 2 up close) all had a larger belly that hung lower to the ground, so I had to think about that compared to this one. The slender belly just looks wrong. Of course, I've never seen a half-starved mountain lion and perhaps they do get that slender when they aren't eating well. Then I had to wonder if it was an albino mountain lion, would it maybe have impaired vision or eyesight that might keep it from being good at hunting, which might explain the lack of weight.

If it is a big house cat, it is a huge house cat. Given that the video was shot from some distance away and the cat still seems a good size, I wonder about the theory it might be an extra-large house cat. When I shoot a video or photo of our cats with a cell phone camera from that big of a distance, they are a lot smaller than this cat. Granted, our cats are only average sized felines. We have had maine coon cats before that did get big enough to maybe trick you into thinking you were seeing a bobcat with a long tail, but they weren't big enough for anyone to mistake for a cougar in terms of size....not even a youngish cougar.

Honestly, by the time I had watched the video 2 or 3 times, I was thinking its gait was almost more like a leopard....not that I think there are leopards running around in east Texas either. I'm just saying that is more what the body shape reminded me of. Again, though, more of an immature one. Every time I watch the video, my opinion changes, which means I just cannot see enough to conclusively feel strongly about what it is one way or another.

Our bad cougar year was a drought year and the ground was rock-hard and we didn't find any tracks. Given that far northeast Texas has been almost as wet as eastern OK, I wonder if anyone has followed the path this cat walked and tried to find, photograph and measure the footprints. Have they looked for scat? Or, for as often as it is supposedly being seen over the last couple of months, has anyone searched for white tufts of fur on a fence? We never found tufts of fur here either, but only looked on the fence near the garden and between our place and the place next door as all the other fences it would have crossed were deep in the snakey woods and it was summertime.

I even considered it might be an atypical bobcat if it is possible that an atypical bobcat could have a tail that long. While we've seen a lot of atypical bobcats the last few years, none of them have had really long tails, though some have had tails a lot longer than typical bobcat tails. And, all the bobcats we've seen this year have been typical in coloring, size, tail, etc. so maybe our run of atypical bobcats is over.

I also noticed in various reports that they mentioned killed or injured livestock. I wish they would have said what size the killed livestock was. Lots of things can kill a calf or kid, but if it was a full-sized cow or large goat, knowing that might make a difference. And the injured ones? A full-sized mountain lion is more likely to kill than to just injure something and move on.

The mystery makes this interesting. I am hoping maybe someone's game/trail camera will catch a better image.