Have been after a dozen large hogs bulldozing my backyard 24/7/365 for the past few months, hunted them many times and have taken out afew the last couple of months.
This one started showing up at one of my feeders real late at night 3-4AM and we went out a couple of times to nail him at 12-4AM with no luck.
Here he shows up on the game cam at 10PM the night before last , so we decided to go out and target him last night:
The dudes hoof prints are as big as my hand:
It had rained all day long from before sun-up to after sun-down, we've had 16 inches of rain in 14 days and pretty much flooded, hot as [beeep], and muggy as all get out.
Thermals were all mono-thermal with undefined washed out gray for all the inanimate background forest tree canopy and terrafirma, but that did not matter as I had the FLIR M-324 Pan-Tilt remote control thermal on my Honda Pioneer set to Insta-Alert and every living creature stood out like a sore thumb.
Came around a corner and could see two large red Insta-Alert heat signature with the FLIR M-324 Pan-Tilt down the forest trail about 3/4 mile ahead, tooled up another quarter of a mile and got out and hiked to the thermal signatures using the FLIR LS-XR the last half mile, so far they could be hogs or they could be deer?
Hiked in another quarter mile and ID'd them as hogs from 450 yards out, keep hiking in and positive ID at 300 yards was made.
Turned on the FLIR T-70 Clip-On in front of the ELCAN at 125 yards and put a 7.62X51mm 130 grain Barnes 3,000fps handloaded slug though his thoracic spine and he was DRT.
When scoping him out in the thermal, did not know his size but he appeared to be 225-250 pounds, however, when we walked up on him he was a very large stout beast and 400 pounds!
Good thing I took the 7.62 instead of the the 5.56 or he would have gotten away wounded and we'd lost him in the rain:
Dragged the beast back to the barn about a half-mile and strung him up to clean him out with the help of the front end loader on the tractor:
That is one solid chuck of meat after removing all the viscera:
140 Quart Deep Sea Cooler with no ice is completely full and weighs around 225-250 pounds.
The shot took about five minutes of stalking, that was the easy part, getting him home, strung up and cleaned out was a job.......