wild pigs are destroying my garden and fledging fruit orchard and i am tired of re-planting. my trail camera shows that they arrive anywhere between 1- 3 am. and i don't want to sit outside at that hour with a gun and wait on them. anyone know how to set African type snares? please include a basic diagram so a simpleton like me can set one!. thanks guys. jerry

www.rpoutdoors.com sells snares specifically made for hogs. They are very easy to set (I believe instructions are included).

Keep in mind that if you do indeed snare one, you'd better be prepared to have quite a perimeter of damage. Shooting is really the best option.

Also keep in mind that you may also get non-target animals in the snares as well.

I volunteer to do the shooting!

Dig an 8 foot wide by 10 foot deep dead fall and cover with palm tree debris, twigs, leaves, etc. Put out corn and etc lightly ontop of the deadfall near your garden. Shoot in the morning.



Seriously though. I would spend one night outside with a gun. go to bed early and set an alarm for 12:30 and be outside rifle or shotgun with buckshot/slug in hand.

I'm telling you, I volunteer!!

Try http://snareone.com/ Newt will set you up. I never snared a pig but snares are easy to use and set.

quote:

Also keep in mind that you may also get non-target animals in the snares as well.

I agree with that statement, snares are equal opportunity employers.

To set one for a hog of any size, all sorts of animals might be using that same path and a snare does not care.

An animal can tear up a lot of stuff while it is choking to death.

I go along with either getting Whitworth out there and letting him shoot them or stay up and shoot them yourself. JMO.

http://www.snareshop.com/cgi-bin/snareshop/basics.html
Here is some basic information. I would think anchoring the snare to something strong enough is going to be the hard part. Snaring non targeted animals has not been a problem but we do not have any four legget pigs running around hear.

If jdollar is in California it will be difficult to hunt the pigs in they are nocturnal since you can only hunt in California 30 minutes before sunrise and 30 minutes after sunset.

Nevertheless, you might be able to setup an ambush near where they bed and catch then during shooting hours.

man, that's what i love about this forum!! no matter what question you throw out, there are always people with the info you need. the referenced websites showed me just how to solve my problem and i already have all the stuff i need to build the snares. as far as by-catch, that is not a problem. in a month of using my trail camera, i have only seen 1 other animal in addition to 20-30 pigs- a raccoon 3 weeks ago. the pigs have gotten so bold that they ignore the camera flash and keep on feeding. i am going to bait them up with cracked corn this week and if they come in earlier , shoot them this Friday night-if not, snare them Sat. night. thanks a lot for the help. jerry

i suppose i could get a predation permit from Fish and Game, but then again WHY BOTHER????????????. MY LAND, MY PROBLEM, MY SOLUTION!!!

Well JD? Packy

JD:

Well here it is five days later.

What's happened since? We're all waiting to hear the results.

Good luck and have fun, good eating too.

George

i decided to hell with it and just set up a pop-up blind last Sat night and got into it at 10 PM. large group of hogs came to feed on my garden at 11 PM and i killed 3 of them with 3 loads of 3 and a half inch 00 buckshot from a Benelli SBE at about 15 yards. spent most of Sunday butchering and packaging them( gutted them and cut the heads off Sat night, then stuck the carcases in the barn freezer). made a point of shooting only the med size ones- all young boars, 80-90 lbs. won't be needing any pork in the near future. past experience shows they will start returning for round 2 in about 2 weeks.

Nice going!

Bt don't count on it being 2 weeks before they return. If the garden provides a viable food source for them, you may have them back in 2 nights.

Good work jdollar! So the problem is temporarily solved!

quote:

Originally posted by jdollar:
i decided to hell with it and just set up a pop-up blind last Sat night and got into it at 10 PM. large group of hogs came to feed on my garden at 11 PM and i killed 3 of them with 3 loads of 3 and a half inch 00 buckshot from a Benelli SBE at about 15 yards. spent most of Sunday butchering and packaging them( gutted them and cut the heads off Sat night, then stuck the carcases in the barn freezer). made a point of shooting only the med size ones- all young boars, 80-90 lbs. won't be needing any pork in the near future. past experience shows they will start returning for round 2 in about 2 weeks.

Good work, but you'll learn to not only shoot the big ones, but especially the sows.

"Temporarily solved?" Well, no, just a different problem--such as "What am I going to do with the next batch I hammer?" But oh, what a good problem it is.

Shoot the sows, shoot the sows, shoot the sows.

That was my point! It's a problem I wouldn't mind having at this moment!

i avoided the biggest sow in the bunch because she had a litter of piglets(4-5). unfortunately a stray pellet caught one of them. he only weighed 7-8 lbs. live weight, so i plan to put the whole thing on the rotisserie on the grill. can you spell tender? as for what to do with the next batch, i have a few friends that will solve that problem- but i intend to let them do their own butchering!! there were 3 pigs in the group that would have easily weighed over 200 lbs.

Believe me, after you find it impossible to grow a garden and the pigs have turned over, literally, your yard, your will think back and wish you'd killed that sow and the piglets too. Sounds cruel, but think of them as large edible rats and you'll be closer to the correct mindset.

Texas ranchers and farmers have paraphrased the old saying, "Any dead pig is a good pig."

If it was my problem, I'm sure that I would look at it differently, but I just can't seem to get enough of hunting them. If I were living in denial, I guess it would be a bigger problem.........

I'm not sure what your denial comment means but the fact is that, even in Texas, where you can hunt them 24/7/365 that sport hunting does NOT begin to control their population. They breed too fast and get very smart very quickly when pressured. No one said that hunting them is not fun, I'd hate to see them go, but if I was a farmer instead of a rancher, my feelings would be much more vehement. I can assure you that if farmers could pull a switch and kill every feral hog in their county/area/Texas, whatever, they'd have to sell tickets to control the lines waiting for the switch. They also directly compete with deer for food, especially mast.

around here, they are more of a nuisance than a major problem. i have very little landscaping and my garden is more of a fun project than a serious food producing endeavor. so i just want to kill a few every now and then for fun and hams. if i wiped them out( which i could probably do if i really tried), i would lose a nice source of after hours excitement!

quote:

if i wiped them out( which i could probably do if i really tried), i would lose a nice source of after hours excitement!

Yeah right, as I understand it, you've killed 3 of them. Let me know how easy it is to kill the next 30 and then tell me how you can "wipe them out."

Trust me: you are in no danger of wiping them out and couldn't do so no matter how hard you tried.

Every once in a while, I hunt for hogs and even post some photos on occasion. But I also shoot them on sight -- even out of the kitchen window -- as they are extremely destructive and wreak havoc with agriculture and eveything else.

I even have a rifle and sand bag next to the kitchen window. Every morning when I get up, I check the sendero that spans from 155 to just over 300 yards. Sometimes I'll even grab a cup of coffee and stand there and enjoy my morning brew. More often than not, hogs will come through and I'll dump one of more of them.

I give away as many as I can, but some do get designated as buzzard bacon. PETA would have a fit if they saw the amount of calcium in that sendero...

But I have done this for years and have had NO impact on the population. So don't worry about wiping them out. It just is not possible.

Here are a few that I actually hunted this month:

Went on an Axis doe cull hunt this spring -- rancher has lots of trophy bucks, but at $1500 per, not for me. At any rate, he keeps lots of Spanish goats on his ranch to keep the cedar and other vegetation down. Thus, he has to keep the feral hogs out 'cause they eat the young goats. His ranch hand had found a place where the hogs were coming under the fence, and put a snare there. Next morning he had about a 150-175 lb boar in the snare, and it looked like he had tried to root plow every square foot of dirt he could reach. The .30-30 took care of the problem.

He looked something like this one:

quote:

Originally posted by Gatogordo:

quote:

if i wiped them out( which i could probably do if i really tried), i would lose a nice source of after hours excitement!

Yeah right, as I understand it, you've killed 3 of them. Let me know how easy it is to kill the next 30 and then tell me how you can "wipe them out."

no, actually i have killed 10 of them all together over the last year and a half- the other 7 during daylight by still hunting their bedding areas on the mountain behind the house. this area is so steep, rocky and infested with poison oak( which naturally is where they bed!!), that i don't go up there too often. it is just easier to let them come to me. i know i could never seriously impact the population on the mountain, but i can kill enough around the house to negatively impact my reservoir of "local" pigs. so i don't want to be piggish.