Hogs are big business here in Texas, where you can pay a couple thousand bucks to shoot them with a machine gun from a helicopter all day, so… what’s the problem? :P
The problem is that there are not nearly enough people that hunt to even keep the population stable through hunting. The fact that hog hunting has become a business is the reason that real solutions to wiping out feral populations aren’t making headway.
This right here. I fell down the “wild boar problem” rabbit hole a couple years ago. I was curious about what controls have been tried and what could be done to bring things back into balance. The statistic I read said that 75000 boars must be killed per year inTexas just to keep their numbers stable there. Holy hell. That’s a lot of dangerous game hunting.
If I was going to guess, the actual numbers killed are far, far lower than that. Especially since there are a lot of very large private hunting preserves that intentionally try to keep their feral pig population high so that they can attract paying hunters.
When I moved out of Texas in 2016, some friends told me there was a $5 bounty for hog tails from the state. So, you could do it for more than fun; less than a dollar a round for .308, then 5 dollars per tail… that’s a decent profit.
Man, I wish good .308 ammo was only $1/round… Even if I’m loading it myself, good 6.5CM ammo (defined as sub-MOA performance) costs about $1/ea. with Hornady 147gr ELD-M bullets, and that’s only if I ignore how much I’ve sunk into a press and case prep.
Yeah, this was before the industry decided on their panic price increaes. It’s weird how post panic prices never corrected. Going shooting is almost painful now on the wallet.
A lot of the prices have corrected, just not all the way down to pre-pandemic level. I remember that primers were flat-out unavailable for a long time, then they were breaking $.10/ea for really cheap SPPs. 9mm ammo was >50cpr for a while, too. Both are down now, but not down to the $.03 for primers, or 20cpr for 9mm. Some of it is inflation in general. Some of it is that there are more people buying guns and ammo now, and there’s a pretty sharp lag between demand and production, since no one wants to build new factories for temporary demand spikes; increased demand is driving up prices. Also, fun fact, a lot of companies that make AR-15s are getting very close to insolvency right now. Each person only needs so many AR-15 variants, and the market is super-saturated. That’s less of an issue with ammo, since it’s a consumable, but it still worries the companies that would be building new plants.
Yeah, I still wish ammo was a lot cheaper, but it is what it is. Instead of high-volume shooting, it means more time dry-firing.
Hogs are big business here in Texas, where you can pay a couple thousand bucks to shoot them with a machine gun from a helicopter all day, so… what’s the problem? :P
The problem is that there are not nearly enough people that hunt to even keep the population stable through hunting. The fact that hog hunting has become a business is the reason that real solutions to wiping out feral populations aren’t making headway.
This right here. I fell down the “wild boar problem” rabbit hole a couple years ago. I was curious about what controls have been tried and what could be done to bring things back into balance. The statistic I read said that 75000 boars must be killed per year in Texas just to keep their numbers stable there. Holy hell. That’s a lot of dangerous game hunting.
If I was going to guess, the actual numbers killed are far, far lower than that. Especially since there are a lot of very large private hunting preserves that intentionally try to keep their feral pig population high so that they can attract paying hunters.
Oh I know, I was being sarcastic, doing the typical redneck ‘lol we shootin’ ‘em fer fun, what’s the problem?!’ type thing.
When I moved out of Texas in 2016, some friends told me there was a $5 bounty for hog tails from the state. So, you could do it for more than fun; less than a dollar a round for .308, then 5 dollars per tail… that’s a decent profit.
Man, I wish good .308 ammo was only $1/round… Even if I’m loading it myself, good 6.5CM ammo (defined as sub-MOA performance) costs about $1/ea. with Hornady 147gr ELD-M bullets, and that’s only if I ignore how much I’ve sunk into a press and case prep.
Yeah, this was before the industry decided on their panic price increaes. It’s weird how post panic prices never corrected. Going shooting is almost painful now on the wallet.
A lot of the prices have corrected, just not all the way down to pre-pandemic level. I remember that primers were flat-out unavailable for a long time, then they were breaking $.10/ea for really cheap SPPs. 9mm ammo was >50cpr for a while, too. Both are down now, but not down to the $.03 for primers, or 20cpr for 9mm. Some of it is inflation in general. Some of it is that there are more people buying guns and ammo now, and there’s a pretty sharp lag between demand and production, since no one wants to build new factories for temporary demand spikes; increased demand is driving up prices. Also, fun fact, a lot of companies that make AR-15s are getting very close to insolvency right now. Each person only needs so many AR-15 variants, and the market is super-saturated. That’s less of an issue with ammo, since it’s a consumable, but it still worries the companies that would be building new plants.
Yeah, I still wish ammo was a lot cheaper, but it is what it is. Instead of high-volume shooting, it means more time dry-firing.
Assuming you’re a good shot and can hit a moving target. More than a couple-three rounds per hog and you start getting into marginal territory.
That’s my favorite kind of conservation.