With the deer season winding down, you may think you need to wait until next fall to go hunting again. On the contrary; hog hunting is very exciting with a bow, handgun, rifle, muzzleloader, or crossbow. And it’s quite affordable.
With the show circuit on the horizon, it’s a great time to speak directly to an outfitter and perhaps team up a pork and wild-turkey adventure. This post on the Grandview Outdoors website will get you in the mood.
In the early 1980s along California’s central coast, a new big-game hunting craze was just beginning. Though we didn’t know it at the time, the same thing was happening across much of America. That something was hunting wild boar. Technically, the wild hogs we hunted then, as today, are not wild boar in a purely biological sense, nor are they North American natives.
In fact, the first wild pigs in the United States originated solely from domestic stock brought to North America by early European explorers and settlers. Domestic hogs were first introduced in the 1500s to Florida by Spanish explorer Hernando deSoto as he searched for the mythical fountain of youth. In later years in California, the Spanish, moving north from Mexico, herded
them along as a food source. In the centuries that followed, free-range livestock management practices and escapes from enclosures resulted in the establishment of wild domestic pig populations and promoted their spread. It was not until 1912 that true Russian wild boar were introduced, first at Hooper Bald, North Carolina, from where they soon were exported to other areas in Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, West Virginia and even New Hampshire.
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