Homemade Sausage Making

Ray's fantastic thread about hog hunting made me want to share some pictures of by far the most successful hog hunt I've ever had. This happened a few years ago right around Thanksgiving or some holiday I can't remember.

Anyway most everyone I know was idleing down from work and looking for excuses to shut down early when someone spotted a bunch of hogs in a field. A few phone calls later and we had three strings of dogs and a few catch dogs loaded ready to go.

The hogs were feeding in a field that bordered a small neck of woods on the north, a road on the west and a large forest on the east but just past the small neck of woods was a large open corn field with absolutely no cover.

Our plan was to set one string of dogs loose to the east in the large forest and have another string standing by for backup. We figured if we put pressure on them from the east and the south we might push the hogs out into the corn field where it would turn into a shooting gallery so most of the guns setup on the edge of the corn field and waited to bushwack the pigs.

One of the strings of dogs



String of Walkers pushed them out of the first field and another string pushed run them through the woods toward the big field.



Catch dog looking a little disappointed for being left out of the action.



As everyone is knows, the best layed plans always have their glitches and rarely go as planned but this day was an exception to this rule. Here is some of what we gathered up within two hours. I wish I could say every day is like this day but its days like this that make up for those other days.



Funny thing about it is when we got everything layed out to clean most everyone vanished.

Boy howdy, that is some real carnage! If guys are disappearing after the shooting is done that leaves a heck of a lot of work for what's laying in the bed of that pick-up, that's for sure. I'd imagine hogs that are running from dogs would have a lot of adrenaline pumping into their blood. I've never hunted big game over dogs, just birds. My son has hunted hogs and bears over dogs and absolutely loves it, but he tells me I might not be able to run fast enough to keep the dogs safe once they've got a animal cornered. Heck, I don't think I've done what could be called "running" in about 20 years now. RAY

I wouldn't call the ones that bailed when the fun stopped. You can shoot tin cans with a .22 and walk away but not food.

I think the ranks dwindled from about 15 to 4 and yes they left us a lot of work but as the Bible says, "he who doesn't work doesn't eat" so we filled our freezers and they didn't. This was some really good meat to because they had been fattened on peanuts and corn.

As for the taste, hogs aren't as bad when run with dogs as deer are. Whenever we kill a boar we immeidately castrate it which helps a little but you can pretty well tell if the meat is going to be tainted. I don't know this to be fact or not but just an observation from dealing with pigs I think boar meat gets tainted more from if he is around a female that's in heat than anything else. I know with the hogs I raise I can sometimes just smell the stench of the boar when one of the pigs is gestating and I don't care what you do with meat like this its never fit to eat.

Ray, I'm with you on the runniing business. These young guys can run through the swamps all they want but I'm too old for that nonsense. Besides, the more the hog runs usually the further it gets from the truck.

In this instance, most every hog we retrieved was laying in the field and you could drive right to them. There were a few they put the catch dogs on and I got mixed feelings about this cause if you don't get there soon enough to stick the pig there won't be much left of either the pig or a dog if he goes solo with a big hog.

Most of my hog hunting now is limited to shooting over fields in the spring or in a stand during the winter months. Ideally, I'd like to get one pig for ever two deer I harvest.