The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 039: Maverick County, Texas. Steven Rinella continues his discussion with ranch manager, wildlife biologist and hog trapper Ben Binnion, along with Chris Gill and Janis Putelis from the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: July 8, 2016

Maverick County, Texas. Steven Rinella continues his discussion with ranch manager, wildlife biologist and hog trapper Ben Binnion, along with Chris Gill and Janis Putelis from the MeatEater crew. Subjects discussed: perception of pigs on a scale from Satan to margaritas; Sus scrofa and the Eurasian wild boar; hog fecundity; whitetail deer breeding vs. pig breeding; what "hogzilla" is and ain't; hog bait recipes; selling wild pigs to slaughter facilities; charging for pig hunts; whether helicopter pig hunts are for sport or control; several bullshit aspects of pig hunting; the best pigs to eat; and how to get hog hunting permissions. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, everyone. Jumping into part two of a two-part discussion out of Maverick County, Texas,

about two things that intrigued me a great deal over the last few years, which is Texas whitetails. Okay, so like big giant bucks in Texas and the culture around that and how they're produced. And also sort of a rider on that, which is big giant Texas pigs. What's up with wild pigs? Why is it that wild pigs are going to come kill us all? We got way too many wild pigs, but then no one will let you go pig hunting. And what happens with all that pig meat?

What's up with shooting pigs from helicopters and all that kind of stuff? Same guess as we had on the last episode talking about whitetail bucks and and growing whitetails and wildlife biology and ecology and all that whitetail systems um ben benyon all right so i don't want to worry yeah i don't want to wear out my welcome but i do want to talk about pigs for a minute i I always talk about pigs. Okay. I didn't know where to start. What we've been doing down here, some months ago, Giannis and I were down here, not filming.

We were just down here glad-handed, socializing. And we got to yapping with Ben here about whitetails, and he shared with us a piece of information that for pretty much his entire adult life, dating back to when he was in high school, he's been involved in trapping wild pigs and selling wild pigs to a slaughter facility. Now, I'm going to lay a little groundwork. If I say something wrong or something that contradicts your understanding, jump in.

I'm going to do some big background stuff. All pigs outside of Africa are one species. So whether you're talking about a Razorback, Eurasian Wild Boar, a Berkshire, those pigs are all. or Texas or California or Hawaii or the Philippines or Poland or Romania, on and on and on. Seuss Scroffa, a highly variable species, but one species. They have a lot of variations, but just like dogs, pigs come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. The ancestral pig, the ancestral pig is what you hear referred to as the Eurasian wild boar. Many, many, many years ago, the Eurasian wild boar was domesticated and moved around the world

kind of in tandem with human beings. So Polynesians had Eurasian wild boars that they got somehow or another through trade or through catching them and introduced them to a lot of islands in the Pacific, and they spread this animal all around. They made a domesticated version, many domesticated versions of Suscrafa, many domesticated versions of the Erafa, many domesticated versions of

the Eurasian wild boar, the ancestral wild boar. Meanwhile, the ancestral wild species continue to exist. To understand that, think about cows, cattle. Cattle

that we know today, our cows that we know today, are a domesticated version of an animal called the oryx the oryx is extinct so the actual real thing that was domesticated no longer exists but we have cows in the case of pigs we have the kind we made in the kind that was there and they have morphologic differences. You can look at them and see characteristics, either they're pure, like you can go to places and you'd be like, it's just a pure wild pig, no characteristics of breeding from human manipulation. And then you have like a pot-bellied pig, which shows a tremendous amount of human manipulation, and then all the gray area between those things.

The first people that brought pigs to the New, so the pigs lived just about everywhere, but not in the Western Hemisphere. So there were no, at the time of European contact, before anybody from Europe came over, there were no pigs in Alaska, Canada, the lower 48, Mexico, Central America, South America. Suscrafa was not in any of those places. It came to be in those places initially, the initial burst from the Spaniards.

And the Spanish would do things such as bring pigs and put them on islands out in the Gulf of Mexico and have sort of be like a larder where you could have them out there and know you could go catch them. Pigs would swim to shore. People would just lose track of pigs. And a guy like Daniel Boone's day, you would go out, if you were going out to settle in the wilderness, you might go out with pigs and just cut them loose, knowing that they would fatten up around there and you could kind of just go find them and almost go hunt up your own pig that was out fattening itself on the landscape. And over the years, we introduced many domestic varieties. Then in the 20s, people started to capture the ancestral Eurasian wild

boar, specimens of wild pig, hunt clubs would capture them and bring them and cut them loose on the landscape. So when you look at what's going on in the US now, you have some pigs that are essentially an uninterrupted line from wild versions, from the Eurasian wild boars that were just brought here, caught a wild pig, didn't manipulate it through selective breeding and cut it loose. You have escaped feral domestics. And of course, there's nothing preventing these from all interbreeding. And so you have this great mosaic of different sorts of pigs running around on the landscape.

What did you just do to my thing? Oh, did I turn your end down? Yeah, the guy, Tom, the host. I thought you might be – I was setting the stage, man. You might be making yourself deaf, but really I need to turn the rest of our stage. You're setting the stage to talk about pigs but i just wanted to lay some foundation because i think i feel as though it's a not very well

understood thing i didn't understand any of that before hearing it i just thought these were all just the same kind of pig running around they all broke loose from some facility a bunch of years ago and they just took over texas there's been wild pigs in texas since the 1500s wow i did not know that probably an uninterrupted uninterrupted line yeah somewhere yeah and supplemented along the way through all sorts of things like just some guy you know like you got 10 pigs and all of a sudden you wake up and you got nine. And one of them, my old man one time went in on a pair of pigs with someone and one pig got away. This guy had property. He said to my old man, he goes, I'm going to buy two pigs.

You pay for all the feed and I give you one when they're fattened. So my old man paid for all the feed. One got away. And then the guy's like, oh, the one that got away, that was your one. So there's a wild pig somewhere running around in Indiana. I don't know if he survived. Pigs are expanding. And you feel that.

But you spent your whole life down here. And this is a great pig habitat. Wild pigs have been a part of your life for your whole life yeah all right so now you talk about pigs well you can't give me something a little more narrowed down what was your first um did you first start dealing with or let me ask you this first, what's your perception of pigs on the good to bad 10 being Satan and one being, um, you know, like a, a, a, a margarita. I mean, I, I could, I don't know if I could put a number on it, but pigs are more of a love-hate. I love trying to control the numbers, but at the same time,

I love just trying to annihilate every single one of them because they're so terrible for the natural habitat. But at the same time, if they were gone, I don't know what I'd do. You know, so I mean, it's... I found that again and again with people who are involved in wild pigs is there's an industry around controlling. I think people have given up on the idea of eradicating wild pigs. Yeah.

It can be done on islands. I think it can be done on islands of a certain size. You can eradicate pigs. Yeah, unless you got some sort of disease like swine cholera or something like that that came in and just wiped them out, but that would still be site-specific to an area. Yeah, even on the Hawaiian islands, they're considered too big for it to be even possible to eradicate pigs. But pigs have been successfully eradicated from very small islands other than that it's not gonna happen so but there's an industry around controlling pig populations so here's a

good place for you to start explain the fecundity of a pig the reproductive abilities of a pig uh well uh i guess uh sow is like in this in this part of the world they you know depending on the habitat they're direct reflect of their habitat. If they have a lot of food or good forage and plenty of water and they stay healthy, sow can usually have two litters a year. And these that we have here usually have probably four to six. I wouldn't say less than know, less than eight. But in some areas, they can have 12 to 15. And usually they're going to raise, you know, the vast majority of those, a high percentage, 80%, I would say.

We'll reach a year of age or whatever. Six months of sexual maturity. Six months of sexual maturity. So one sow can put off so it's not outlandish that a sow would put off in a year 12 offspring six females who within six months are able to breed and put off yep the same number of offspring Now compare that to what a whitetail deer can do. Right. A whitetail is going to breed once a year

and possibly on a good year, she's going to raise two fawns. And how old does she got to be to start? Down here, they can breed at six months and have fawns at a year. Can they really? But that does not happen very often. It's got to be a special. You're saying a fawn, like a year can they really but that does not happen very often it's got to be a special fawn like a deer born in may well our our fawns are born in july even which is even later which doesn't make any sense to that but they run in december they run in december but so it's feasible

that what it could be possible that one could become pregnant. Usually what happens with that is it's a fawn born early, say June. Okay. Comes into, and then that fawn will come into season or estrus in February and be bred in February. Gotcha. And usually, and that's what, that gets back, goes back to the deer part of the discussion as far far as mother nature's way of saying, screw you. Because if you get the habitat on point and just exceptional, that's what happens. Those does are healthier. They breed a little bit earlier. They have fawns a little bit earlier. Those fawns have tremendous amount of milk and grow faster. And then all of a sudden they're coming into season and then they're having fawns. Well, that's a baby raising a baby. So her offspring is set back

because that offspring is going to be, if she's born, bred in February, she's going to in turn have them even later. I got you. You know what I mean? So you made conditions so good that you're deteriorating the that's exactly right health and quality of the animals that's exactly right but uh so oh go ahead well i was gonna say you know if you want to touch any more on that or go back to the pig jump back into i'm just trying to make the point of how quickly pigs yeah in the absence of control yeah that's a that's a word a lot of people have a struggle with but in the absence of the control that pigs can become the dominant yeah they will take dominant creature on the landscape they'll take over everything they i think they they're saying right now that you have to you have to harvest 70 of the existing population to have a negative effect on that population. Yeah. And this is the thing that I find that people who grow up

or whose frame of reference comes from outside of wild pig country, such as myself, becomes hard to understand, that there's just a generally accepted thing in wildlife ecology or wildlife management or let's just say a generally accepted notion in environmental thinking is that we should give precedence to

native animals. So we should promote the endemic species of the western hemisphere or whatever particular area we have instead of having a homogenous world occupied by just Norway rats and Eurasian pigs and Eurasian pigeons and English sparrows, that we should try to create an environment where native wildlife can thrive. And doing that in places where pigs were introduced long ago or recently involves

trying to really knock back and control non-natives because non-natives aren't from this system. And a lot of the things that might step in and control them in a natural way don't function don't work you know english sparrows if you're in a grocery store parking lot and there's a bird pecking around under your car that's probably an english sparrow which was brought to the u.s to control uh thinking they're going to control insects and then you wound up having a huge bird problem. And English sparrows almost drove, for instance, the eastern bluebird to extinction because they're a cavity nester

and they out-competed our native bird. And the things that held sparrows in check where they came from didn't apply here. They got here absent their predators and exploded. So this is a general thinking that we have an obligation to cut pigs out as much as we can because we will lose many native species and particularly native ground nesting birds, types of vegetation if we just let pigs go. Because they're voracious eaters and they eat everything. Right. From grass to bird eggs.

And you've been heavily involved in that, controlling pigs on properties. Yeah, yeah. All right, now tell me about just how you got started in doing that. I guess, you know, whenever I was growing up, we hunted whitetails, and pigs were always like a side bonus, You know, whenever I was, when I was growing up, we hunted, hunted whitetails and pigs are always like a, like a, like a side bonus, you know, cause there was, there was no, there's no laws, no limits. You could, I mean, all you have, if you have a hunting license, you can kill them. So when we'd be hunting whitetails and, and I'd be sitting there with my dad and we'd say, and he says, well, you can't shoot that one. Cause that, that deer's too young.

That deer's not big enough. This and that and this and that. And then a pack of pigs comes in. He says, here's a rifle. Start shooting. There was no, you know, didn't matter. And that's kind of what got me all fired up about him because you can do whatever you want. You can kill 10 of them if you want to. And it was kind of that greed, you know, that hunter greed.

It kind of started it. So here's something you can go hunt whenever you want right you can go hunt them any time of the year whenever you want all you got to do is have a license and somebody to say yeah you can go on my property and most of the time everybody would say go ahead for wild pigs yeah because they want to get rid of they wanted to get rid of them because they were so detrimental to uh grazing pastures for cattle to cattle feed yards where they're trying to feed them out for meat production, and for the native wildlife, for quail and deer direct competitors here. So that's kind of what got me started in kind of my love for chasing them in trying to get rid of them or trying to kill them i'm not really trying to get rid of them but uh it's just fun to try because like you said

before you're never going to get rid of yeah eradication has been i believe it's been sort of like in an academic sense the idea of eradicating wild pigs has kind of been ruled out right it's not like notwithstanding some technology that might come out that would be probably very dangerous to deal with which would be like some kind of disease right that we could introduce or it's probably not gonna happen right they're mostly just trying i think just control their control distribution now right that's kind of like they keep their range within texas in the southeast and not let it spread all over the united states yeah i think that's like yeah controlling um limiting growth of range and then controlling within that range because part of limiting growth is probably controlling within the range yeah yeah and uh the uh i guess uh the

the the the ranch that i grew up on that I mentioned earlier where I learned everything I've ever known about whitetails had river bottom, seven miles of a major river. And in Texas, any major river had held pigs because it was riparian habitat, but also because floods carried pigs and dispersed them into other areas. Floods carry pigs? Yeah. Well, floods, people would have a farm in a pen of pigs next to the river, and then it floods, and it just washes them down the river. Gotcha. So then it just populates further down and further down

until they're everywhere. So they expand along river corridors. Correct, yeah. That's a lot better way to put it than what I said. No. No, I like your way better because it explains how it could happen. Yeah. But so that's kind of what I grew up on.

And aerial gunning wasn't really a method whenever I was younger as far as shooting them from the helicopter. And, uh, so the only real way to, uh, the only, the only options people had to control the numbers was, uh, was by hunting and by trapping. Those are the only two options and shooting with a rifle from a, uh, you know, from a sitting position or, you know, just set setting up on a field or, uh, or field or even spotting stalking, you get one pig or two pigs in the night and that's a good day. But it did not help have any impact on population control. Whereas trapping, we could, or you could, you can catch multiple pigs at once, family groups or whatever. But whenever I was younger, my stepdad had two traps that he would use to try to control pigs. So I'd go and help him and my mom set these traps.

Explain one of these traps real quick. They're exactly what we're using right now. So they're a square box trap made out of metal with a gravity door that's on a hinge. It falls, you know put basically you put a stick under it with a with a trip wire and uh they hit the trip wire pulls the stick out from the door the door gravity pulls the door down and closes and traps the pigs and these are made out of like welded six and four inch welded uh welded angle iron is the frame with uh with like cattle panel welded inside the the frame of the

of the uh angle iron and what are the dimensions those things eight feet yeah most of them are eight to ten feet long and four or five feet wide and usually three or four feet tall yeah just to demonstrate the efficacy talk about how many you've ever seen get caught in one trap at one time i guess uh i've caught i've caught 13 or 14 on several occasions how many do we have today in one seven we had seven and one um the other day i get that gives you an idea yeah and the other the other day in an eight foot long trap i caught uh i had five pigs over 100 pounds because you say numbers and then people are like oh they're all babies well i had i had five over 100 pounds so and then four that were 40 pounds.

So today we checked eight traps and handled how many pigs? We had 13 pigs today, which a couple of those traps were. And that's a few hours of work. Yeah. Just to sit and check. Yeah, I had today and yesterday, I've trapped 18 days this spring. Had 18 trap nights, and I've caught 100 pigs as of today. Exactly 100.

Exactly 100. It was 99, but then I remember we had one yesterday, so that's 100. And how many did you trap since you started keeping track? 47, 95. 4,795. Yeah. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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to the on x club y'all so so now we'll go back so your old man had a couple of these traps yeah he had a couple of these traps and uh and it's just like i'm sure what you experienced trapping up north uh that whole catching or or hunting you know trapping is just a different way of hunting and uh where you can set something up to try to trick an animal and then you go check it the next day to see if you see if you're you know what if you could outsmart them and catch them. And it kind of started out like that. So I'd go with him to check them in the morning,

and you pull up on that trap and there's a hog in it, and it just, you know, it's excitement. And, well, then I had a mentor, and whenever I was a little bit older, when I was first entered high school, there was an agriculture teacher who trapped hogs also. So I'd go on the weekends and I'd go with my stepdad and trap hogs with his two traps and catch one every once in a while. And we'd shoot them just to more than – it was more just to try to get control on the population. So, uh, this ag teacher, he started, uh, I started talking to him and he says, yeah, well, I, uh, there's a USDA inspected, uh, slaughter facility in my hometown that I didn't, I didn't, I mean, I was 13 or 14 at that time. I didn't know about it.

And, uh, it had opened in the early nineties, I think. And they would buy live wild pigs and, you know, and sell them or they butcher them under USDA inspection and then sell the meat mostly to other countries, a lot of European countries, but they sold all over the world. So these guys are buying wild pigs, brought in by trappers, slaughtering them under federal guidelines, and then they can sell them for public consumption. Yep. They're exporting most of the meat, but it was all for human consumption.

Yep. And you, like, wild game in the country. Like, you can't sell wild game. You cannot sell any kind of wild game. Yeah, so when you walk into a restaurant, I'm talking to you, the listener. When you walk into a restaurant in America and you see venison, for instance, on the menu,

or you see quail on the menu, one of two things is going on. It was either raised on a farm or ranch under, like, livestock conditions, okay? either raised on a farm or ranch under like a livestock conditions, okay? Raised on a farm or ranch and slaughtered as like a game farm, or it was imported. Because most venison,

when you go into a restaurant, when you buy venison, what you're typically buying, typically, is you're getting red deer raised on a ranch in New Zealand. If you go and see elk on a menu in a restaurant what you're doing is you're not buying an elk you're buying yes it's an elk genetically you're just buying a farm animal brought up on a farm um that the fact you can't buy a wild game is is part of what saved american wildlife and it was part of a big suite of wildlife laws that went into effect in the 1930s when we were about running out of wild animals, and we were countering the impacts of commercial hunting, market hunting.

The fact that you used to have absolutely unregulated hunting, and you would go out and shoot as many animals as possible year- to sell them into markets so in new york you go down you buy mallard ducks and quail and passenger pigeons which are now extinct and deer meat and on and on and on buffalo tongues stuff killed on the wild and sold um pigs as a non-native are in a whole other category however you don't we don't sell um hunted wild pigs like you can't when you go into a restaurant you're not getting hunted wild pigs right from america it's pigs that were walked through the door of a slaughter facility yeah right that's correct and how did that like how old were you when you started to do it you know i mean i was i guess i was 14 because i built that first trap and that was my uh that was a shop project and uh metal shop metal shop and uh and i needed i needed a project and uh and i said well i'm gonna you know my my stepdad has two traps i'm gonna build a third one and uh that's the one you welded the penny onto no no yeah i wasn't a good welder back then i can't i couldn't

have welded a penny on anything but uh no that's my new ones but uh yeah so that that old that original trap i wanted a third trap and i was gonna start that was gonna be my new economic venture for myself for a side job in high school was I was going to start trapping pigs and selling them to this facility and making a paycheck. And that's, that's kind of what started me is that that was, that was an idea that I had because this, uh, this, uh, shop teacher, the metal shop teacher had built this fancy trailer where you could run them up a shoot and put them in a trailer live very easily. And all these traps shop teacher had built this fancy trailer where you could run them up a shoot and put them in a trailer live very easily. And all these traps that he had built were the rights, the same size and all uniform. And he could, uh, he trapped these pigs on the weekend and then go

sell them. And he'd make, you know, a couple hundred bucks a week or a hundred bucks a week back then or whatever. And, and I saw that and I wanted to do it i wanted to try it so that's what got me to build that first trap so then i started trapping with three traps in a cattle trailer that i pulled behind a single cab ford ranger that was not meant for pulling any kind of trailer and i'd pull it hundreds of miles a week and hauling pigs back and forth at that age at that age well it uh i guess I started, uh, I started, let me back up hauling your own when you became, yeah. Hauling my own when I was 16 from 14 to 16, I got my mom to help me load the pigs in the trailer. And then she'd drive them.

And I'd ride them passenger seat to the, the sale, the, the, the butcher plant and I'd ride in the passenger seat to the butcher plant, and I'd sell them. And then she was basically, she'd drive the truck and back up the trailer, and then I'd load the pigs. What kind of poundages are we talking about? Back then, it was very small scale when I first started out. I'm talking like I'd get a big company check for $12. Like you'd get like a pig. Yeah, or two or three small ones that weren't worth much. And most of those checks were less than $100. And I was not making a dollar a profit. I mean,

I was way in the hole. But it was fun. And was getting money back and it was just in the ranch that or the property when you're like a kid that age you play video games you don't make shit back no one asked you about that right well what did you make playing video games right right yeah exactly and uh and in the property owners would be they'd they'd pay my corn bill or my bait bill with no problem because i was getting rid of pigs for them. Yeah. And, uh, so it kind of escalated from there. And then 16, I started driving and then I got, got into shop, metal shop a little more and started building more traps. I built my own trailer when I turned 17, which is the trailer we use today. And then I use that, I built that shoot about the same time. And, uh, 18 i graduated high school uh and went straight

into college three days after i graduated high school and uh what happened to the little summer break they give you uh i went into summer school summer summer college just because i wanted to i i hated school and i wanted to get it over with a lot of people who hate school take a different approach they just don't show up. Well, yeah. I hated school, so I went right back. Well, yeah. I was literally out my senior year summer. I was out of school for three days.

And I went right back into summer school. I had academic scholarships for summer class, actually. So I went right into that to summer school, and I'd have class from like 10 to 3 during the day. So I went right into that to summer school and I'd have class from like 10 to three during the day. So I couldn't really work. I didn't, couldn't have a nine to five job on the ranch or on the, on the, is that I moved in with my mom and my stepdad to live with them through the first year of college or actually it was the first year and a half because I went the summer. And so I'd trap and they didn't, the ranch the property owners didn't care they wanted to

get rid of the pigs so they let me trap so i i ended up building trap after trap after trap and at one point that summer uh when i was 18 in college i had 28 traps that i was running from i was 18 and 19 there There was a one year period. And that's when I started keeping count. That's whenever I realized that, Hey, something magical is happening and I need to start writing this shit down. The magic being high volumes of pigs. High volumes of pigs. I learned how to do this stuff right kind of deal. And that first year I trapped 1,800.

Then you're making money. Then I was making like four grand a month in college. And this was 12 years ago. And trapping pigs. And I didn't have, the property owner paid my corn and paid most of my fuel because i was getting rid of the pigs for him so i was and you still didn't run out of pigs no no it's hard to put a dent in oh because after i caught that 1800 that first year i never caught more than 400 after that in one year okay so it So it went way down. Like I got all the dumb ones out of the way that first year. So you went into it just an unexploited resource.

Yeah. No one had been going after them, pouring to them like that. Nobody had touched them. Yeah. And they were just, they were all naive and would go in any trap. You didn't have to think about it or anything. Yeah. The ones that are left on that property, the big ones, will never be trapped because of me. They're not going to go into a trap.

Something happened where they got out or something, and they're smart now. If they see a trap, they're going to leave. What's the biggest wild pig you ever trapped? I got five right now. I've over 300 pounds. pounds so can you speak to and you have a great amount of authority on the subject no one's going to question your authority on the subject can you speak to for once and for all the whole like pigzilla bullshit like when a guy comes out and says i killed an 11 or no let's not even even given that I killed an 800 pound wild pig. Will you tell listeners what that man killed? It was a domestic pig,

straight up domestic pig. Those, you know, feral pigs don't get that big on, you know, natural food. Yeah. Someone was feeding that pig and protecting that pig and raising that pig up so that someone could then shoot it with a gun and say they killed an 1,100-pound or whatever giant. He was probably in the wild and the hunter may not have known, but he didn't grow up in the wild.

He didn't get that way. Right. He was turned out, in my opinion. Yeah. So of that 4,000, what? 47,95. yeah so of all of that 4 000 whatever 47 95 okay so out of 4 795 wild pigs you trapped not in high fence pig raising operations but wild ass pigs born in the wild running around doing wild pig stuff the biggest one? I think it was 317.

There you have it. Yeah. Me and your podcast. And now I killed one. I killed one that was bigger than that. I killed one with my dogs. I caught one with my dogs that without guts was 340. Okay.

But still not eight. No, that one was 410 live and that was he i mean i have pictures of him and everybody says he's 700 pounds or whatever and you what do you think do you think that pig was just based on your impressions of location and condition you feel that pig got that big in the wild yeah he was just a flute it was a he was an outlier it was it was a year i killed him in october and it was an exceptional uh uh fruit year as far as the prickly pear fruit and the mesquite beans which are both nothing but pure starch and sugar and that's i have a feeling i i attribute his size to to that i think he had the frame, a huge frame, and he just packed on the pounds that particularly.

He had a lot of body fat. Yeah. Yeah. What impact do you feel? Let me try to find a way of putting this. So in this country, when did people start feeding corn to deer? Man, I don't know. Scott would would know more than that way before me is that right yeah people were using corn feeders to attract yeah and manipulate deer longer than your life yeah yeah i mean i remember i remember guys

talking about using using corn in the 70s without feeders, just pouring it on the ground. And I know earlier we were saying that wild pigs have been here since the 1500s. But did the practice of corn give us the wild pigs we know now, the numbers of wild pigs we know now? I think it's definitely a contributing factor to the because i i feel like we have even on this place we have an artificial population that we created with through feeding through feeding deer yeah okay because it because it creates it it just creates healthier, healthier females, which in turn

produce more young. Yeah. Um, in the absence of corn, this is a two part question in the absence of corn, what are the pigs eating? And if, and what percentage of their diet is made up of corn that they're scrapping out of deer feeding deer feeders? I don't, I don't know. Man, I don't know if I could even answer that. They eat so much. There's such a variety in their diet as far as they eat anything from rotten fish that came, you know, that died in the creek to, you know, to, to birds, to, to bird nests, to, I mean, to the fruit, the natural fruit that's produced on the prickly pear and the mesquite in the mesquite trees. I mean, there's such a variety.

I don't even know how to... Everything. Yeah. They eat everything. So I don't know how to answer what percentage of their diet would deer corn be because I even... Are there pigs that subsist exclusively on deer corn? Or do you always find some native vegetation

or native matter? There's always something different in there. There's always something different in their guts. And they're a simple stomach, so they don't, when you open up their stomach, most of the stuff in their stomach is not fully digested. So you can tell what it is.

And it's, there's all sorts of things in there. So if no one, if again, this situation, I keep jumping into, I know it's a really complicated situation, but let's like all people cease to exist.

People all die. Yeah. Do you feel there'd be a crash in pig numbers? I think they would slow down. I don't know that they'd necessarily crash, but I don't think that they would increase as fast as they are now. There was, this particular property before I got here did never fed, and there was pigs here.

And they were running cattle. And they were running cattle. But they are... And you guys, when you came in here though i remember you saying that when you came in here there was a shitload of pigs there was a shitload of pigs very few small pigs like babies which meant that they the reproduction wasn't there uh or they had just hit capacity and weren't putting off big litters yeah i don't know don't pigs put the brakes on like that i think pigs disperse before they would do that okay i think they would disperse into the next you know yeah and and all of the seeds to reproduce they

would just be just move yeah and in our neighbors our neighbors all of our neighbors all the way around uh they put tons of hunting pressure on so that's why i feel like that's why they were concentrated on i got you so when you came in this property had never had corn feeders on it even a few years ago no no maybe a little bit you know in december somebody might have came in and spread a little bit of corn on the road but not enough to yeah make a difference but it had a pile of pigs yeah and another interesting thing about corn you were telling me about is that right now deer could care less about corn yeah they couldn't care less about corn right right deer deer eat deer eat what they need um the reason that corn works so well in the wintertime is because there's

very little natural food so they deer turn to corn uh this time of year there's so much natural forage for them in the in the brush in the in the brush and the brows and the forbs that we have growing right now especially after rain like we have like now when it's so green they don't have any desire to come to corn. Even though it's like candy to them, they'd still prefer natural browse. But the pig likes corn. Yeah, the pig's going to take corn because it's the easy way out. And then explain, talk about the bait you like to make. Okay, well.

To lure pigs into a trap. Yeah, I use two different ones. I use just straight up sour corn, which is just corn with water and it just ferments and turns rotten and it stinks. Oh my God. Does it stink? Yeah. And, uh, that one's, that one's good. But the one I prefer is, uh, is a little mixture that I've come up with. I read it in an article in a magazine, uh, several years ago and kind of touched, touched it up, you know, manipulated it into my own recipe now. And it's 100 pounds of corn, 50 pounds of Milo, 25 pounds of sugar, three packets of baker's yeast,

about 10 or 12 packets of raspberry jello, and three canisters of Tropical Punch Kool-Aid and mix that up in a- It's making me hungry. Yeah, and I'll go get some if you want some and, and mix all that up in a 55 gallon drum barrel and fill it with water till the water is about 10 inches over the top of the grain and put a lid over it. And with a small pinhole in it and it let it ferment and let it ferment in a

six pack of beer just to speed up the fermentation project it smells like boone's farm it smells exactly like strawberry strawberry hill boone's farm that's how they make that actually yeah they just filter out all the other stuff yeah they just straight out the corn and sell that stuff to college kids how much time does it need for cooking uh two weeks two weeks this time of year, which we're in the end of May right now with about 90-degree days. So two weeks of summertime in the sun is primo, is prime. You can use it earlier than that.

The main reason I use that stuff is to keep non-targets like deer and turkeys out of the traps. They don't like that stuff. They don't like that stuff, but it also also pigs can smell it from such a greater distance and you the deer and turkeys don't even bother your traps or come up to them whereas if you use regular corn you're gonna have a bunch of bycatch of in in stuff that i don't want to have to explain to somebody as far as catching a deer or turkey yeah which isn't legal you You have to turn them loose, and it's not good. Yeah, so best to put something in there they're not going to eat.

Right. What was your bait like prior to finding this recipe? I used corn whenever I was in high school. Solid corn? No, just straight corn, and I caught a lot of deer. Really? Yeah. They'll go in there.

Yeah, and that was not sitting well with the property owner. So I had to figure out how to do something different. And that's whenever I switched to sour corn, to just straight sour corn. Yeah. And I think I figured out that, or I found that recipe right in that timeframe of that first strong year, around 18, 19,

whenever I hammered that, 1800. How much does it cost to make a barrel of that? It's about a $100 bill to make a barrel. But that's a hell of a lot of bait. That's enough bait because I use it in very small amounts in tandem with something else or with the sour corn or the regular corn. So it'll last me an entire trap season, which an entire trap season for me right now is about two months.

And I usually do that in the springtime when it's still cool. Wintertime, I don't have time because we're doing the deer stuff. I don't have time to mess with pigs. Summertime, it's too hot and they die really quick. They overheat because they can't sweat. on the animal yeah they stress out super super fast and uh so i i usually try to trap somewhere between february and the end of may i usually try to do a 60 day stint in there this year i didn't quite i only i had uh 18 trap days but that's actually about you know 35 to 40 work days as far as moving traps

pre-baiting and everything yeah how many pigs did you pull off the first year you trapped this place and how many pigs did you pull off this year it's that first year i had about 350 and then this year i had 100 so you it's slowing down yeah it's they're slowing down. Yeah. I like the way we're going right now. If I could do 100 a year consistently, it would satisfy my blood thirst without eradicating them. So I'd be happy with 100 a year. Walk me through the sale process. You load these things in a trailer and drive them down the road. Wild pigs. Yeah.

And you get some serious looks driving down the highway with a bunch of wild things in a trailer and drive down the road wild pigs yeah yeah uh yeah and you get some serious looks driving down the highway with uh with a bunch of wild pigs in a trailer so yeah so what he does he backs up a trailer so you got the trap yeah you got a little chute yeah it's like a splice between the trap and the trailer with a ramp in it yeah back it up back the trailer up to the trap so you can't be you're not lugging these things out in the middle of the desert i mean you're setting it like where you can get a vehicle to it right you have to yeah and then open the door pigs run up it goes to the chute to travel yeah pig runs out of the trap into the chute into the trailer double door on the trailer so you can load more multiple hogs at one time yeah so you have some up in a holding area and then you got an area they run into and then you let those in and yeah basically acts like a storm door yep yep um

honey tuck what honey tuck that's what they call them in alaska they do yeah a little before you go into the house where you take off your boots yep and then you drive down the road and go to the place. Yeah. I usually, what I'll usually do is I'll hold them up. I have a pen that I have a shade and water in and I'll hold them until I can get about, you know, enough for a paycheck. So I usually try to get 10 or more. And, uh, if I get, sometimes that takes two days, sometimes it takes five days. Uh, I don't ever let them sit in a pen more than five days. If I only have two, I'll still take them in after five days.

Just because I don't like having to mess with them in a pen as far as taking care of them. And they don't want you feeding them. And they don't want you to feed them out. They want them as wild as they can be. Because they're selling them as wild pigs. They're selling them as wild boar. If they're castrated, they will not buy them. Really?

Yeah, because it affects the flavor of the meat. And what's castrated, they will not buy them. Really? Yeah. Because it affects the flavor of the meat. And what's the minimum weight they'll accept? Right now it's 40 pounds. That changes. 40 pounds live weight. I think they call it, I think it's, I can't remember. It's all kilograms, but it's 40 pounds right now. And sometimes they move it up to 80. So it has to be a minimum of 80, but right now it's 40 pounds. But right now for a 40 move it up to 80 so it has to be a minimum of 80 but right now it's 40 pounds but right now for a 40 pound pig they're giving you seven and a half cents a pound for a 40 pound pig which isn't even worth your time okay and then what's the next gate what's the next step up uh i'd have to i'd have to look i think it's it's it's 40 to 80 is seven and a half cents a pound. 80 to 100 is 20 cents a pound.

And then 101 and up is 35 cents a pound. And then 100 to 150, you start into head bonuses. So they give you a bonus per pig. So like 100 to 150 is a $5 on top of the 35 cents. So that'd be $40 for a 100 pound pig. Uh, so like a hundred to one 50 is a $5 on top of the 35 cents. So that'd be $40 for a hundred pound pig. And then 150 to two 50 is a $10 head bonus at 35 cents. Then a two 50 and up is a $15 head bonus plus 35 cents a pound. So, uh, uh, what is that you get like 110 for a real big one um whereas a little one you're getting three dollars yeah you know so it makes you know you always want the 100 pounds plus i call those money hogs because you're getting 40 for a money for 100 pound plus you get 40

so all those ones that are not worth not of sale, you just dress them out and bring them to families. Right. I usually give them away to families in need. A lot of families that I give them to, that's the only meat they get for the year. They can't afford to go to the store and buy meat, and they're not on government assistance. So the only meat that they get is coming from that cooler down there. And you bring them to them dressed out. Yeah, bring them to them dressed out, and they'll bring it in their kitchen table and sit on their kitchen table and work on it just a gutted out

pig yeah yeah the whole family it's like it's it's it's a lot like the native villages up north it's just everybody gets involved and nothing goes to waste yeah the ones you can sell you bring down there and you pull up in your trailer and those things are getting slaughtered that day a lot of times they're getting slaughtered that day depending depending on what time I show up. But I think they buy right now, they're buying nine, nine o'clock in the morning to noon and they butcher until five that day. And, uh, they try to do 300 a day right now. Um, they operate Monday through Friday and they're doing about 300 a day, or they try to reach at least 300 a day. And so I'll back up.

I pull up there with my trailer, back up to their offshoot or their unloading chute, and I unload all my pigs into that. It's like a holding pen. We shut the door, and it has a scale on one end that has kind of guillotine doors on each end. So we'll run one pig in at a time and it's a balance. You don't mean balance scale. That's going to trip people up. He doesn't mean guillotine. Like it's not cutting the pig.

Yeah. It was like a sliding door. Yeah. Sliding door. Yeah. So it's a sliding door on each end. So, so it's like a,

it's like, it'd be like a square box where you open one in the pig runs in, you close that in. So you have one pig and close in the box. And then it's, it's sitting like a square box where you open one in, the pig runs in, you close that in, so you have one pig enclosed in the box. And then it's sitting on a balanced scale with counterweight suit. So that's how the scale works. And you weigh them, individual pigs, one at a time until you weigh them all. You write down the weights on the sheet.

And then whoever's weighing signs the sheet and then sends the sheet up to the main office, and you go up to the main office, and they cut you a check right there. Right there. Yeah, and they write down, they record the location, the pigs were trapped, how many days it took you to trap them. I can't remember. There's a handful of questions.

If it was a wooded area, open area, or farmland. Why do they care about that? I don't remember. There's a handful of questions. If it was a wooded area, open area, or farmland. Why do they care about that? I don't know. I think it's just survey stuff, but it's a sheet you fill out every time. So what do you put down for here? Good info. This is wooded area. You know nothing's higher than six feet tall, would it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You wouldn't call this open. No, for sure. They're talking about like open fields for open. I got you. Or farmland. What's the most you ever hauled

into one trip? That day I caught, my best day, I caught 47. And I hauled in 47 that day. They were all big enough to sell. And I hauled them in a gooseneck trailer.

47 big enough to sell? Yeah. So that was a fat ass check. Yeah, that was like 1,800 bucks or something. I think think it's about it's under two grand what's your reaction down at the slaughterhouse when you roll in with 47 screaming hogs there's ben and they have a hard time getting enough guys to trap pigs. Yeah. As much as you hear about all the pigs. Yeah, yeah.

Because it's a lot of work. I mean, y'all saw just a couple of days worth, and it's a lot of work for people, and they just don't. People don't like to work a whole bunch. Not that kind of work. Not that. Yeah, not that kind of. They don't want to go get stinky and then go get, you know.

They don't want to use bait that stinks like shit to catch hogs that then throw water that smells like shit on them. Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. I took a shot of that water to the eye today. Yeah. So here's the observation I have about pigs. This is something I've struggled with for a long time.

No matter what source it is, here's the observation I have about pigs. This is something I've struggled with for a long time. Oh, no matter what source it is, whether it's newspapers, nightly news programs, outdoor television, you get the sense that, holy shit, wild pigs are going to kill us all.

But time and again, I hear from people who say, man, would I love to go hunt wild pigs? It's so expensive. Why is it? Why are people able to charge for pig hunts? That's changing. I don't know if that's that way anymore. Yeah. They're not that expensive down here.

But it's, you go online and type in pig hunts. The top thousand hits are going to be you paying someone to hunt pigs. Yeah. Meanwhile, you're getting paid to hunt pigs. Yeah. What's going on there? Do you understand? Do you understand the question?

No, maybe not. Yeah. Just ask the question. No, Chris, you haven't said it. Word. Ask my question. Why is it that you could get paid to trap a pig? But if you want to shoot it, you got to pay to do it.

If you don't have land, he was paying attention. Yeah. Why are there not farmers out there with a big sign that says, welcome hunters? Because the general public are idiots and they don't want them on their property for the most part. So the one that they hate more than pigs is the public.

Yeah, exactly. That's a great way to put it. That's what it is. Yeah, it's the public. Yeah, exactly. That's a great way to put it. That's what it is. Yeah. It's got to be. And it's just the commercial. The people that are selling the pigs,

they're doing it for financial gain for themselves. They're buying pigs, importing them into their property for sale. There's very few people that have pigs accidentally that are selling pig hunts. I'll say again. Oh yeah, because that's the thing you were telling me. Are you able to talk about that? Did some guys, I whisper to you that some guys trap pigs and sell them to places that hire for pig hunts? Yeah, yeah. I mean it's it's 10. Yeah, I've been approached about it several times and I, I've done it a few

times back a long time ago and, uh, beyond the statute of limitations. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, I don't do it anymore just cause it's a, it's an ethics thing to myself, but, uh, there's laws against transporting live wild pigs and turning them loose alive. Yeah. For even for any purpose. Well, it's illegal, but it's not a game animal.

So the game department does not enforce that law. Gotcha. It's a, what do you call it? It's a federal thing. Yeah, it's USDA, but it's, there's a, what do you call it? It's a federal thing. Yeah, it's USDA, but it's USDA enforced, but they don't have someone that actually enforces it, even though it is a law. But I can't remember what it is.

The Animal Health Commission is kind of a big part of that. So if you called them and said, hey, man, can i bring a bunch of pigs over and sell them to a guy who's gonna then sell them to hunters online they would say nope but no one's gonna actually stop you exactly yeah exactly and a guy when you go online he's like night vision pig hunts he's buying those pigs yeah from a trapper or someone, putting them into his penned facility, then telling Joe Blow from online,

we got a serious pig problem down here in Texas. Come down and get all dressed up in tactical gear and come out and shoot these here pigs that I just bought. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, that's what it boils down to. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. You got any questions about that? The people? I got a few. Here we go. Now that you're exhausted there's there's there's another man in the room i'm not gonna identify him because he's just hanging out mate he's actually cooked this dinner he's having a cold beer um sir does all of this sound like does all of this you're born and and raised in Texas, worked in law enforcement.

Does all the stuff we're talking about sound accurate? The pigs can be trapped and relocated to a ranch, but they have to go directly to that ranch. The ranch has to be inspected by a USDA inspector to make sure that the pigs that are relocated there cannot get out of that perimeter fence. And if it's a boar, it has to be castrated before they can be released on that property. I thought it was castrated

boars only, no females. That may be. Do you think people could hear that? Nope. Okay. So sum that up. Well, so just say, you know, integrate what he was saying to what you were saying and give the whole picture. And I know, and I know exactly what he, what, what he's, uh, what he's talking about. There is a, there is a, uh, there, the sale of pigs for commercial hunting is possible, but the facility that the pigs are turned out in has to be inspected to be considered pig proof. And the only pigs that are allowed to be transported and released for hunting are castrated males.

Females are not allowed to be released for hunting purposes. So you go into a place and shoot a pig and it doesn't have any nuts. That's what I was going to say. Something is going on. You pay a bunch of money and you go hook up to your nutless pig and you're like, how'd that happen?

Yeah, you probably could have got a better deal going to hunt one of my brother's lambs. But again, nobody enforces that. There's no division. There's no division to enforce that that law is being followed you believe that sir he's nodding yes the law our our uh our expert our law enforcement individual is nodding that he agrees that there's not enforcement on that right um man but for

trophy purposes you probably get a nice trophy out of a castrated boar, right? The castrated boars are perfect trophies because the meat is great, and their teeth grow differently when they're castrated. They call them barred hog. Yeah, they're barred. So when a boar has testosterone— Can I tell you how it was put to me? Yeah, go ahead. That it takes their mind off of grass? When a boar has testosterone. Can I tell you how it was put to by me? Or not how it was put to me? Yeah, go ahead.

That it takes their mind off of grass? No. That it takes their mind off of ass and puts it onto grass. Right. But I'm talking about their teeth. For trophy purposes, I'm talking about their teeth growth changes when you bar a pig. The testosterone is what keeps the top teeth growing to sharpen the bottom teeth. So when you take away that testosterone influx, their bottom teeth continue to grow without being sharpened down.

Which one's the wetter? Which is the cutter when people say that wetter is on top that's the sharp wet stone yeah and uh and that's the one i believe that one stops growing whenever they're castrated and the bottoms just continue to grow to enormous length so he starts to look more vicious but in temperament he's not vicious right it's all smoking mirrors on the wall when you got his mouth open and his hair all standing up, people walk in your office and go, look at that thing. Yeah, and little do they know.

Yeah. It was a eunuch. Exactly. Yeah, a eunuch who just thinks about grass. Yeah, that's exactly right. Oh, my God. I don't even know what else to say. I need to take a break. There's exactly right. Oh my God. I don't even know what else to say. I need to take a break.

There's a claim. Like the pig. I think that someone, I think that someday a historian is just going to need to just do like a big investigation and take a very careful look at just like wild pigs in America and hopefully do a different story than wild pigs are gonna kill us all or so-and-so shot an 1100 pound super pig yeah but like it just seems a very rich field

to tap into and it's a, the thing, it's just a huge resource that we can, there's got to be a niche that we can put it into, even though it doesn't, it's not native and it didn't have one.

There's got to be something that we can, you know, we can benefit from it. In California, it's a flat out game animal. And see that, that,

you buy a tag, you got to put that tag on the damn pig. It's like a non-resident, it's like 75 bucks. It's a flat out game animal you see that that by a tag you got to put that tag on the damn pig it's like a non-resident it's like 75 bucks it's a they don't have a lot of game like you know native game is not yeah i should say they don't have a lot of game it's not a great hunt that's gonna sound awful for people living in california i've hunted in california it's just like relative to other western states it's not a great hunting state they have pigs there's a tremendous amount of interest in pigs people like to hunt wild pigs they like to eat wild pigs i love to hunt eat wild pigs and they treat them like a game animal

it's none of this like non-game do whatever you want you know you buy a tag in uh in treating them like a game animal is is creating them in opinion, it's the reverse effect that you were talking about earlier with deer and elk. Back when the market hunting was going on and we put into place all these laws to protect and put value on game animals. So people started protecting them and now there's more than there's ever been. Well, pigs, people are starting to put value on them as a hunting animal in commercial hunt, commercially hunt them. And that's creating a reverse effect is they're overpopulating. They're growing to a point where we can't control them because there's enough people out there protecting them. Are you aware that a handful of states in the eastern U.S.

have made it illegal? One or a handful? No, it's a handful. Not just the east, but midwest. Illegal to hunt pigs. Yeah. Thinking that by making it illegal to hunt wild pigs you would interfere with the introduction of wild pigs for the sake of hunting because like

with california when they trace back a certain strain of wild pigs they have there they were brought in to hunt well that's oklahoma's going through a big a big deal about that right now about a law change about something about uh hunting pigs at night or something like that they're thinking that it would help eradicate the pigs and all it's actually going to do is create more problems for law enforcement um they're there i believe the law was something along the lines of you can hunt pigs at night without a license and the way the laws read now in oklahoma you have to have a license to hunt anything and you have to you cannot hunt anything at night so that's going to cause a whole new can of worms

for law enforcement to enforce those laws yeah and uh but no I I agree I think that's a good way if you really wanted to get rid of them to make it illegal to commercially hunt pigs to charge people to hunt pigs that would be a good way to slow down their growth de-incentivize people to shelter pigs if you were serious about getting rid of pigs if you were serious about getting rid of now and not only shelter but transport Yeah. And foster the growth of. That's exactly right. Is helicopter hunting for pigs sport or control? Depends on who's shooting.

Would it exist outside of recreational hunting? Oh, yeah. It did way before all they started charging. I'm really surprised they actually, like in texas that law just passed uh it's been recent years that it passed where you could actually sell hunts to the public to shoot pigs out of a helicopter they were doing helicopter culling before they were doing it was all helicopter like you didn't you couldn't pay somebody to go do it okay you you would have a landowner pay the helicopter time and invite guests to do it.

But it was illegal to actually... You couldn't sell a helicopter hunt. You couldn't advertise a helicopter hunt until a few years ago. You couldn't advertise on an outfitter's website. He couldn't say, hey, come out and hunt with me in my helicopter. So what gave birth to the helicopter hunt for hogs?

Just a fast way to shoot a bunch of pigs. Fast way to shoot. Just the bloodthirst of people. But it wasn't a control mechanism. It's, I mean, it started as control, but people were having so much fun.

They're like, Hey, we can charge for this. Yeah. You know, let's figure out a way to get this, but it started out like the same way they do like aerial wolf control in Alaska started out like part of someone's job is to go out and reduce the

numbers of pigs. A very effective way of doing that is to shoot them from a helicopter. Right. It would be like me starting to charge people to come out here and run my traps. Yeah. It's a similar situation. It's just a lot more fun with a helicopter. Yeah.

So what's meat recovery like with helicopter shooting? Most people that I know, they might keep one or two and they run them to a field and shoot them in a field or something so they can retrieve them yeah but most for the most part they just leave them lay just can't retrieve them no because they you can't you know you can't get to them uh in in a uh you can't get to them with a vehicle you can walk in and pack them out but they're shooting know, 100 or even 200 or 300 a day. And there's nobody, you know, and if it's hot, there's no way that meat's going to stay good. Yeah, you have to drop a little smoke canisters too.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I've shot them. I've ran them out into fields and shot them with a helicopter with the intention of going back and getting those pigs to eat. And by the time we're done flying for that day, of going back and getting those pigs to eat and by the time we're done flying for that day i go back and get them and either the vultures have started or they're they're they're no good this meat spoiled or because it's too hot yeah it's too hot i got even in the winter time if you don't gut something down here it's not it doesn't get cold in south texas uh in the winter time even it's cold for us but it's not cold enough to

sustain a unguarded animal for more than a few hours if that does that yeah they spoil that fast right yeah yeah even in the wintertime what are the best we over the last few days like we've been talking a lot about meat quality on pigs we butchered a bunch of pigs for meat today yeah give some thoughts on like what what's the best what are the best pigs to eat i keep uh for my own um you're real particular yeah i i i keep about maybe one in every three or four hundred uh and it what's the one we're eating tonight it's one of those it's uh basically it's a sow, female, not too old, uh, extreme excess amount of fat. And, uh, usually they put on that fat about, uh, I guess halfway to halfway to three quarters of

the way through their pregnancy before they start lactating at all. And that's when they have the most body fat and they're doing nothing but eating. And, uh, I try to, I try to shoot them either in the head or somewhere or in the shoulders or somewhere that's going to, uh, put them down without any kind of adrenaline rush or, or any kind. So trap pigs, I'm not a big fan of trap pigs because they they in or dogs dog caught pigs because they uh have adrenaline and it's a lactic buildup lactic acid buildup in the muscle and it and it makes the meat a little tough and makes it a little gamey you'd rather just get them in a hunting style you know in a hunting style you don't know what's going on and bam he's dead right exactly he doesn't have no idea. He's just sitting there, you know, eating acorns or, you know, whatever

he's doing, eating corn and just, and shoot him and he's down and then go up there and bleed him out. And then I, I, I completely skin them and then gut them hanging up and wash everything down. So I don't have any hair or blood or anything anywhere. It's not supposed to be. I'm not saying that's the only way that you can do it. That's how you do it. But that's the way that I like to do it because I can. And one in every three or 400 is where you go like, that one is for my freezer. Yeah, that one right there. Not giving it away, not selling it. Right. Why do you skin them first before gutting them? It just makes it a little bit cleaner because I save every part of that particular pig, I save every single part. I cook and eat every single part.

The ribs, the shanks on the legs, everything. The neck and the jowls are some of the best part. But when you gut them like we did today, those pigs on their ribs didn't have quite enough fat to to save the meat in it uh on the ribs part i mean you can you can save them but you're gonna have to have like four slabs of ribs to make a meal for one person on the small ones uh so when you get those in the field the only thing you're doing is it gets the inside a little bloody which is the only thing that that's going to affect is the ribs for the most part uh that's i guess that's the primary reason that I hang them up. So let's say you're now, you're a guy that doesn't have three, 400 pigs

to cycle through to pick out the one he wants to eat. And I appreciate it. This will be the second time I've fed off this exemplary pig. Yeah, yeah. What cut are we having tonight? What cut do you want? I don't know, what cut you thought?

I got some shoulder chops and some regular loin chops. When you eat it, it's not a domestic pig. No, no. It's good. It's fatty, but it's still different. It's not like you bought it at Whole Foods. Right, right.

It doesn't have the marbling that domestic pig has. It has the external fat, but no internal fat. It's good stuff. Yeah. How's that pig meat coming? Is he cooking right now? No, I got it in the, I'm waiting on you to stop asking me questions so I can go prepare it. Okay. So let's say your guy who doesn't have the luxury of like sifting through 300 pigs to find the one he wants to eat. Just give me quick, quick, dirty. What's a fellow looking for in a wild pig? If I, if it was, if if it was mean i didn't have the access that i have i would choose

a uh you know 50 to 80 pound female that does not have a litter of pigs on the ground so she's not lactating and uh a fatter one which i don't know how you would you don't you can't really choose them um you know what i mean you can't look at a group and say i want that one and you know that's going to be the best eaten one you have to get them on the ground and get up to them yeah um but if other it would if that's that's what be my my ideal pig but the the 30 pounders the 30 pounders that are in decent condition body condition those things are i mean those are awesome you cannot screw those up but nobody wants to shoot those because they want the biggest one out of the pack it goes back to the ego thing yeah so when a sounder which is a group of pigs like a family group when a sounder pigs run out

people are like just i'm gonna shoot go to the biggest one yeah i always shoot a medium-sized female if a group comes out yeah like a meat hunter yeah a knowledgeable meat hunter is not looking for the giant right right because usually even if it's even if it's if it's a female that's giant uh she that usually means she's older and it's going to be a little little tough and maybe a little gamey and you're saying a big old boar nuts and tat can just have a stink to it yeah i i've had a couple of europeans like it yeah i've had a couple of them that did not smell like a boar when i was cleaning them but as soon as you started cooking the meat the smell would just take

over the house yeah and uh and that smell every time you put it on a fork and put it up to your mouth that smell would hit your nose before the meat fork and put it up to your mouth that smell would hit your nose before the meat hit your mouth it didn't have the it didn't have a bad flavor it was just the smell that would make it unappetizing now do this rate the uh quality of the mule deer buck we had for dinner last night in a what one to ten say nine buck meat phenomenal yeah that buck i've never i would never i've never rated a buck over a five let me give you that that buck this is like a thing to defy stuff where a lot of people are like oh you know like you can't shoot a big buck because he won't taste good dude that bark listen buck would... Listen, I've been told that mule, deer,

it doesn't matter, fawn, doe, buck, or it is not for the consumption of people. I've eaten... This is going to sound like a bold statement, but I've eaten thousands of pounds of deer meat. And that, Yanni's 195-inch, ruddy old, that was some of the best buck meat I've had in a long time last night.

That was top. Dude, it was good. I was surprised how good it was. Yanni's a fine cook. Well, you know, I think a lot goes into it, though, because it was Kiel it was kills one quick shot you know that gun went off and he was dead three to five seconds later cold weather cold weather cleaned very quickly you know hung which is very well taken care of me you know it's also been sitting in my freezer for six months now because it's interesting i've been talking to you know clayton

who we're going to see tomorrow and then you now mentioning the adrenaline thing about a trapped pig you know versus one that's just shot and i shot a mule deer that was half the size of that one in montana and had one of my worst shooting episodes ever. And just like, I took off my glove because I'm always telling everybody, take your glove off before you shoot. You're going to touch that trigger accidentally. And did not have my crosshairs on this buck

and missed him on the first shot. Glove on? No, glove off. Oh, okay. And I was just kind of basically just getting ready to get it done. It was like, it's on right now. But before I brought my crosshairs to him, you know, missed him completely. He runs.

Yeah, he had buck feeling. No, I didn't. That's the thing. It was weird. Anyways, yeah, it turns into a big shootout, you know, five or six rounds later. And him being pretty stressed out you know he's dead and that buck i mean it's even his back strap i mean you can take a chunk that's of his back strap that's 18 inches long and hold it by one end and it doesn't bend yeah thaw it out you

know what i mean it's just got so much just lactic acid buildup stop me if i told this story before one time uh i know i've told you but stop me if i told you on this here format um and then we'll wrap it up and you go cook that pig meat yeah this is my concluding thought um one time i was hunting and i shot a mule deer out a mule deer buck in november on a pretty steep slope with some wet snow on the ground and the buck slid down the hill out of my view. So he's kind of like sliding down toward me, but gets to like a, you know, a bench and vanishes. I just think it's slid out of view. I go up there and I start looking around and I cannot find that buck anywhere. This is an area that has a lot of big sinkholes.

It's like heavily eroded breaks country where you got like a heavily eroded river channel. It makes like canyon country flats up on top. And I realized that there's a hole in the ground, maybe like the top of a barrel. And I find some blood in the snow and realized that blood ends at the mouth of a barrel. And I find some blood in the snow and realize that blood ends at the mouth of that hole. Now, walking around this area, you see these holes, and you think, like, there's got to be dead people

in some of these holes from way ago. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, because they're all covered up in sagebrush and stuff, naturally occurring. And they'll have an outlet way far away. So it's like a cave. And if you sniff around and look around way down in the cut, you'll sometimes find where all that mud busted out of the ground and washed away down the river.

I shined down in there, and it shaped like an hourglass. And it was 13 feet deep. And I can see, I'm looking through the hole that's the size of a barrel, and it's open like a small room down in there, and I can see the buck jumping around down in the bottom of the deep hole, and not thinking about sound, it was getting dark, and I'm trying to look down in there, down my barrel. It's too dark for my scope. I shoot and blow my eardrums like you wouldn't believe because my head's down the, I'm leaning down into that hole and I shoot into the hole.

And it just rattled my cage in the worst possible way. By the time I kind of regroup mentally, my ears are, you know, I can't see anything down the hole. I go down and we're camped, tent camping on the river out of canoes. Come up the next day in daylight with a big hunk of rope, took the bow line off the canoe and came up and my buddy held my ankles and I got down and I was able to get a lasso around that deer's antler and pull it up out of there.

I had never hit it a second time that my shot that blew my ears missed that buck was the only wild game animal the only big game animal i've ever handled that you honestly could not eat the meat. It was so foul and it was frigid. We have had a long, long debate about whether or not, about what went on with that buck. And we butchered the whole dang buck. And we were like, we would cook a piece of meat and then go outside to eat it, trying to rule out that there was something in the house that made him taste this way.

And we had a long debate that still is unresolved. Was it because he was down in there, not dead for a long time, and just under a tremendous amount of stress? Or because he was insulated and soured in that hole as part of the experiment my brother once cut off the hair patch on a mule deer's the cut off the tarsal hair patch on a mule deer and put it in a ziploc bag and then wiped that on a piece of meat he was about to eat and ate the piece of meat trying to replicate the taste of that buck that came out of that hole in the ground. I still don't know today. It was worse. It wasn't bad.

It was bad, but it wasn't bad. It wasn't that bad. It wasn't the taste. So he ate urine-flavored meat, basically. So, yeah. I feel as though, because it was so unbelievably cold, it was well below zero that night. Um, matter of fact, our river trip ended because the river froze. So I feel it had something to do with just the enormous amount of stress that zero was under. And it's funny

because this story starts to make its own gravy because a thing I've brought up is a lot of people who will get into hunting and and I feel that people get into hunting and they've some aspect of their life maybe they've been told the hunting's bad right and they'll get into hunting because they really feel like deep down they want to hunt but they want someone to tell them it's okay part of the way that they find their way into it is they go like oh oh, it's so humane. Like industrial slaughter facilities are so stressful for animals and it's just grotesque and you don't know what goes on there. And I'll go out and cleanly get my own animals in this super humane way. And he's just happy and living his life. And then all of a sudden, right, he's dead. And I look at that case, and I'm like, well, that's a direct,

that's like a direct contradiction to that line of thinking. And I'm a very experienced hunter who's done a tremendous amount of hunting, right? And I don't make a lot of mistakes. I make some. I don't make a lot. I couldn't anticipate a giant hole in the ground that I wouldn't be able to fish my deer out of. But I think that that animal

was stressed and suffered to a point that was so extreme that it ruined the meat. And in the meat processing industry, there's a term of red cutter, which would be a highly stressed out animal that has carcass attributes

that make it that they'll pull it off the line. And I think I had a red cutter mule deer. What do you think about that? That was my concluding thought. I think that's what happened, not the souring. Cold night. You southern

revs wouldn't know the kind of cold I'm talking about, Ben. Yanni, what's your concluding thought thought it's kind of another question for ben or does it because i was doing some reading on you know the wild pigs in texas before it came down here it sounds like after talking to you that it was before you really came into pigs that they went from being this kind of like very cool novelty that everybody wanted just a little bit of. And then all of a sudden, by the time you got into pigs, people were already like,

please come on to my place. Yes, we'll pay for your corn and trap them away. Right. So you can't really probably speak too much to that transition. Right. Or I don't know if maybe if you can from like your dad's experience or you know other people that you knew but there obviously was a time when everybody was just like pretty much on board it was like yeah sweet he's like like let's have a just a few of

these around because it's cool right well that's that's how it was like i said whenever i was little you know six and seven eight years old growing up hunting deer they were a treat and you know we we loved them we weren't trying to eradicate them we just we we shot them and hunted them yeah and uh uh but then whenever i was you know in that few six seven year period is when they really started they kind of flipped that page and now they're a nuisance you know before whenever i was people to some people when i was younger it wasn't like that it just it that's about that time is whenever i saw it turn a page and so back to just like paying for a pig hunt do you feel like because now because i

just before i came down here i was talking to a friend of mine he's like man i'd love to go down there and shoot some wild pigs but by golly i'm not gonna pay for it you know because i know that they are farming do you feel like that opportunity maybe buy some phone calls or some connection it exists yeah like for a guy that's not the average joe blow dumbass public guy that you said that the farmer dislikes more than he dislikes his pigs right you make some phone calls make yourself sound like a like a responsible good hunter that closes gates you'll probably get a free pig hunt yeah it might take you a handful of calls but you'd get you'd get one well let me explain my pig hunting spot um the place i've done the bulk of my pig hunting is in california central valley and i went to graduate school with a gal whose dad is a large animal vet in California.

And through talking to her and whatnot, I became friendly with the father, approached him about pigs, got a very provisional invitation to come out and hunt pigs for a couple days, was told where to go, when to go there, who to come check back in with right away. I now have a standing invitation to hunt pigs on three beautiful pieces of property out there anytime I want. As a matter of fact, in my notebook,

I got a note from him explaining to anyone that messes with me to mind their own business. So, yeah, I did it it it can be done yeah and i didn't do it through my work i did it through a college friend yeah he this guy don't give a shit what i do for a living yeah you know just like i just took it slow i already did my concluding thought i got another hunting permission where i started out like yeah i started out by hunting squirrels on a guy's place eventually he's like you know what you want to do a little deer hunt turkey hunt you come on out after squirrel hunting right not leaving the gates open and shooting off toward his barn and whatnot

i mean i've gotten i've gotten gained permission on places down here in a similar fashion people that i've never met before meet them for the first time you know uh and then just kind of talk to them a few a few times throughout the season and then that even just just kind of developing a friendship without even without going and hanging out with them just talking to them and then they're they said you know you know, you like to hunt, right? And I said, yeah. And yeah, you can come out and hunt at my place anytime you want. And it's just, you have to develop that friendship and that trust

before they'll just let you come. You can't just call somebody and say, you got a pig problem? I'm going to come out there and shoot them for you. And boy, am I going to shoot a lot. Chris, concluding thoughts? Yeah, it's kind of a hypothetical question for Ben. Since you spent so much time on both species, say you're like sitting in a blind one night,

taking photos, and you see the biggest buck you've ever seen. And then like 10 seconds later, you see the biggest boar pig you've ever seen which one would you get more excited about seeing i'd be clicking about a thousand pictures of both yeah but which one would get you more like no i thought you're talking about with a gun you with this camera yeah i mean just saying more excited just more more fired up like based on how much work you put into it like scientifically, which one are you?

Man, that's a tough question. I think I do the pigs just because they're less desired. Really? Yeah, everybody loves big deer, and everybody's always going to love big deer. Big pigs, nobody likes. I mean, nobody likes pigs. Last night, Ben was explaining to me the extremes that people go through for big deer, and he said that he's seen people get divorced

over big whitetail bucks. It's your turn now for a concluding thought. You don't have to have one. I don't have to ask myself a question? No, you just have a thought, a random thought. Talk about whatever you want it's just you get a chance to not even be within the flow of conversation marital advice is often given at this i don't think i have a room to talk about that

no i don't know but you might have some some advice on the subject that goes around marriage. Me and Yannick could give you marital advice. You don't have to have a concluding thought. No, I don't know. I feel like I've said enough. Well, there you have it. Ben Banyan, thank you for joining. Wealth of information.

Thank you for having me. Go cook my pig meat. It's going to be dark. you Thank you. you you you