I've been having a fairly decent time chasing hogs in Dorchester County, SC for the past few years, decreased the population by well over 200.
Initially it was sounders of hogs and the traps worked well, large coral traps, but nowadays it is just a sporadic roaming boar having a bad night.

Here's a fine specimen, just over 200 lbs.

Another more recent boar, 19 Apr 2021. It took about two weeks for watching cameras to finally catch this fella off guard in a corn field.
Didn't weigh this one but I figure he's another ~200 lb fella, looks small as he managed to be a DRT in a hole he rooted and my boot is not at his level.

(Hopefully these images are visible... I'm hosting straight from Facebook.)



Decent cutters on him.

And a large sow on 27 Mar 2021, 304 lbs on the game scale.

Your SC hogs look different than our Tx ferals---for the greatest part, ours look like escaped domestic pigs. Occasionally I encounter one with bodies like the first pic--

dustoffer:

The local feral hogs I've encountered are mostly black with some red hogs at times, maybe an 80/20 mix. The long-hair "wild" variant is rare for me, maybe 2% of the hogs I've eliminated. I have come across a few mottled white ones and a few blonds but very rare... one light colored I caught and dispatched had been castrated.
I've been after the local hogs for about two years now and I'm no longer catching large sounders either in the trap(s) or feeding in the crops... nowadays I encounter lone boars or a lone sow or one with perhaps one or two piglets.
I spent a bit of time in TX after hogs a few years back, KNOX county, shooting between Knox City and Guthrie... fun but not too productive in numbers.

Here's the largest boar I've found here, about 315 lbs. He seemed camera smart and avoided bait, the majority of initial evidence was his rooting and large tracks, and a few blurred photos of him passing a camera with some haste. I placed a array of cameras across a field he seemed to cross at times and caught him off guard one night.

A large catch... and one VERY happy farmer afterward.

Looks like some euro blood there

Quite a variety of hogs. That big boar looks
domestic to me. I don't know the breeds.
What breed do you guys say he was?

Nothing like the Fla hogs I saw and shot.
They had real heavy shoulders and skinny
ass ends, long up turned noses. All black.

Looks like that trap was set on a mud wallow.
Hell of a mess of messy hogs. Does that save
on the corn bill? OR heavy rain just before?

Glad you joined us, welcome to the board.
Lets see more of your kills.

George

Boy, those hogs haven't missed too many meals, have they?

georgeld:

These feral are by my speculation and local "tales" a mix of various "brought in for sport" and escaped/released local domestic.
I and the farmer(s) I trap and shoot for don't speculate too much on the breed/source except for the rare ones such as my first post of the Euro-looking hog and other oddities such as the blond castrated boar.

That trap was set in a cut-down during a rainy spell, there were crops all around and the hogs were using the wooded area and the cut-down as a pathway to the various fields. It wasn't such a mess when we put the trap in place but during the "introduction phase" the hogs made a proper wallow out of it. It was a mess for sure and probably my largest catch.

I don't come across hogs that appear undernourished... lots of food in this area between the many fields of peanuts and corn and the offering of the surrounding swamp(s).

I retired to this area of South Carolina in January 2017 and began hunting hogs in the Four Hole Swamp in December 2017 and sort of branched out shortly after that. I bought a Trijicon IR-Hunter thermal in February 2018 and made my first few feeble coral traps in April 2018 then went to large cellular controlled coral traps and cellular cameras in March of 2019.

The traps work well and as long as the hogs feel comfortable and the entire sounder enters and calms down so we can make a good complete catch, not a good idea to educate a hog about a trap and expect it to enter one later. Some hogs seem to be very wary and want nothing to do with the traps, they feed and venture right up to the threshold but won't cross... those are night hunt hogs with the thermal.

Night shooting is common but not nearly are effective as the traps, the property(ies) are registered with the SC DNR with kill counts reported at year-end.

Building the better hog traps was an interesting time, we deployed the first proper trap in March of 2019 then built four more once we had most of the bugs worked out.
We used 96" x 60" utility panels, twelve per trap plus the 8' gate. Initially we used "T" posts and wired the panels in place but in October of 2019 we welded up frames for the panel, enough for 36 panels... tedious.
The cellular controller (KiaoTime AutoSwitch with an AT&T SIM) is a four relay device, we use only one relay to trigger an aftermarket automobile door solenoid to drop the gate, there is a SouthCo rotary latch at the swingarm bar.
The cameras we use are Spartan, they deliver (push) to my cell phone with about a 20 second transmission delay.

The first trap we placed, a "T" post version.



A couple of the gates being built.


The cellular switches.



We can put two gates on one trap and slave the second from a single relay switch. This setup seems to be more user friendly for the hogs.



The first deployment of the solid panel traps, MUCH MUCH better, I can set this trap in place by myself in less than an hour (on a cleared site).

Very good pictures and explanations.

Sure looks effective and well made.

I know about tedious. Dad had a 1500 ft well
he had 1" steel pipe in and had it pulled every
summer as part of the lease agreement. He saved
the bad sections until he had quite a pile of
them.

Then we hauled 'em all to my place and I made
corral panels. By the time I ran out of pipe
I'd had more than I wanted of that mess.

Sure made a stack of panels though. 5' high,
ten foot long with hinge pins to match.
They worked well and nothing ever broke.

Thanks for sharing your traps and catches.
Look forward to more.

George

A few pictures of past hogs.

Big ol' swamp sow:


A nice swamp boar.


A small Euro look boar:



Another Euro appearing boar:


A corn raiding boar, decent size pig.


Swamp sounder:


A daylight swamp sounder:

quote:

I've been having a fairly decent time chasing hogs in Dorchester County, SC for the past few years, decreased the population by well over 200.

Correction: I'm sure you've killed well over 200 hogs, but I very much doubt that you've decreased the population by that much. Those buggers can reproduce faster than you can kill them. Congratulations on your success, anyway!

It could very well be that those remaining are practicing avoidance but I've gone from seeing and catching sounders of a dozen or more to sporadic events of lone boars or a sow and a piglet or two killed during night hunts with the thermal.
The corn and peanut crops were being visited/rooted nightly two years ago and now they seldom have so much as a track.
The area the farmer I help plants encompasses about 12,000 acres (about 20 sections) with maybe 3,500 acres he plants over that expanse, the rest being residences and woods or swamp. There is a seemingly natural barrier to the northeast side being the Four Hole Swamp and to the southwest being Interstate 26.
We were pretty hard on them initially, having all five large corral traps deployed for nearly a year, we have but two out now and haven't seem but one hog at the traps in perhaps 6 months.
Granted, this isn't Texas but we've pushed them back pretty good in this small(ish) area.

I figure the effort initially, about a year or so was about the equivalent a full time job placing and moving traps or perhaps a bit more with the frequent night monitoring of the trap cameras alarms and/or kill and remove the hogs. It is much less time nowadays as reports of hog sighting(s) and rooting in fields is pretty much non-existent.

I use Google Earth to record kill sites and other pertinent information, I tag images to the sites and kill dates. I share this information with a local Audubon land manager that maintains a GIS database for other hog kills around the area. Every once in a while we'll have a "known" hog and can track movement of the hog across the area to determine their travel routes.