Hog Wild Whole Hog
They are a scourge on the land, causing Texans $400 million in damage every year. They also happen to be very tasty. And that’s why Tink Pinkard and Jesse Griffiths believe they have found a solution to the age-old problem of feral hogs.
Tink Pinkard, one of the founders of Hog School, and the author at Madroño Ranch, near Medina.
Photograph by Jody Horton
Related Multimedia
Related Stories
If you are one of those Texans who get annoyed at that herd of does in your flower bed or the rutting buck that kamikazes into your Tahoe, consider yourself on notice: Things are about to get worse. Much worse. With a population now exceeding 2.6 million, feral hogs in Texas have hit critical mass. Females can have up to two litters a year, with an average of five to six piglets each, and they are outbreeding deer, humans, and every other large mammal in the state. Like many creatures of the night, they roam in packs, long-toothed and short-tempered, willing to eat nearly anything, including their young. Picture a smellier version of the zombie hordes from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, running 30 miles an hour and not particularly caring whether they eat your brains or your leg.
If you were to invent the perfect invasive animal, you could not do much better than a hog. Smarter than dogs and as fast as deer, they are also extremely tough. While many of the stories about bulletproof hogs are apocryphal, some of the larger boars do have a gristle plate that will stop a bullet fired from a handgun—my father once shot one with a .357 Magnum, only to watch the animal shake it off and walk away. J. Frank Dobie wrote about frontiersmen flattening rifle balls against those same gristle plates.
Pigs, along with horses and cattle, were introduced to North America by the Spanish, who probably did not realize that this hardy food animal would eventually cause $400 million a year in damage, overrunning our state’s city parks, backyards, and cemeteries. Columbus dropped a few off in the West Indies in 1493; de Soto introduced them to Texas about fifty years later. Though some claim that the introduction of Russian boars in the early twentieth century made the pigs more aggressive, the truth is that they have always had an attitude problem. The Greek mythological figure Adonis was killed by a wild boar; at least three Roman legions used the boar as their symbol. Having been charged several times in the Piney Woods, I can attest that things have not changed much, though I will further attest that most hogs are not bulletproof and, when properly civilized in an oak-fired smoker, are quite delicious.
So why, if these pigs are so tasty, are there still so many of them? How come hunters haven’t wiped them out? In fact, the State of Texas would prefer they did. There is no closed season on feral pigs. They can be hunted any time of the day or night, using silencers, spotlights, night-vision scopes, AR-15’s, or AK-47’s. Thanks to Stephenville representative Sid Miller’s so-called pork chopper bill, they can be hunted from helicopters starting on September 1. It may not sound like a fair fight, and it isn’t. Unless we radically change our tactics, we don’t stand a chance.
While boars might reach 400 pounds, the average size seen in the wild is just under 150. When properly prepared, they are delicious. Leaner than domestic hogs, they have a slightly nutty flavor that makes their meat more interesting than regular pork. This fact alone—they taste good—should have led them to the same fate as the Longhorn, but it has not. Pigs are survivors.
Enter Jesse Griffiths and Tink Pinkard. Jesse grew up in Denton and now runs the Dai Due Supper Club, in Austin, whose all-local meals have won praise in food magazines like Bon Appétit and Food & Wine. An avid hunter and fisherman, Jesse does not look at a feral pig and see a roving machine of destruction. Rather, he imagines several hundred intricately prepared dishes, from braised pork belly to pork chops in spring onion gravy to standing rib roast.
Tink grew up working behind the meat counter of a grocery store in Oberlin, Louisiana, and in his adult years he became interested in big-game hunting. After graduating from Stephen F. Austin State University, he spent ten years as a hunting guide in places ranging from the Rockies to South Texas. He has faced down charging grizzlies and wrestled hundred-pound catfish out of the Brazos (which, thanks to another bill just passed by the Legislature, is also now legal). He trains his own hog dogs, and he has guided people on boar hunts all over the state, including a group of Zimbabweans who wanted to hunt them with spears.
Last year, Tink and Jesse decided to put together a unique class: a field-to-table course that would show students how to hunt and butcher a feral hog, then prepare a dozen dishes. Think Ted Nugent meets Emeril Lagasse. “You’ve got an invasive and destructive species, which also happens to be delicious and plentiful,” Jesse said. It only makes sense to eat them.
Tink’s interest in teaching the class was a little less theoretical. His family ranch, near Rocksprings, was overrun with hogs, and he and his father were killing a hundred a year, mostly with AR-15’s. And yet, after giving away the meat to everyone they knew, they’d been reduced to burying the rest of the animals. “Finally, I told my dad it had to stop,” said Tink. “The killing didn’t bother me—it was the waste. A quarter of the people in Rocksprings are living below the poverty level, and we were burying thousands of pounds of meat with a tractor.”
Which brings me to Hog School, a weekend course held in March at Madroño Ranch, which sits on more than 1,500 acres in the steep country outside Medina. About four years ago, the owners, Heather and Martin Kohout, began to breed a herd of buffalo, and the ranch today, with its lush grass, distant views, and buffalo wandering around, gives you the feeling of being on the set of Dances With Wolves. Madroño is blessed with large amounts of fresh water and is, as a result, overrun with hogs. Although the Kohouts do not lease their land for hunting, they were happy to host Hog School, which they believed fit into their overall plan for land stewardship.
The eight students, each of whom paid $1,350 to register, began to show up on a Friday afternoon, a broad mix of Texans and Midwesterners that included chefs, oil field service techs, professors, chemists, and lawyers. A few had never hunted before, but most were experienced outdoorsmen who wanted to both take a hog home and get an in-depth lesson on properly preparing it. The truth is that most hunters today know less than they will admit about preparing game for the table. They might be quick about getting their animals field-dressed, maybe cutting out the loins or backstrap, but the rest goes off to the processor, where it is magically turned into a few boxes of sausage, which do tend to accumulate. Last winter, while digging around in my freezer, I tried to remove my wedding cake to make room for a few more pounds of venison sausage. Unfortunately my wife caught me, and the venison was given away.
On Friday morning, before the students arrived, I had gone out to one of the blinds with the photographer, Jody Horton, to take pictures of hogs. After five hours spent shivering, we didn’t see a single one. Finally Tink picked us up, and we had a big breakfast of Jesse’s wild boar chorizo and eggs. After lunch, which included rabbit dumplings and local salad greens prepared by Dai Due’s Morgan Angelone, we all headed back to the blinds. There were a few shots in the surrounding hills around sunset, indicating that the students were connecting on pigs, but Jody and I saw nothing except squirrels, blue jays, and woodpeckers. Plenty of hog sign but, at least during the daylight, no hogs.
This, of course, is a problem that has plagued hog hunters in recent years. “Hogs are a lot different than they were in the seventies and eighties,” said Billy Higginbotham, of the Texas AgriLife Extension Service. “They have become a lot more nocturnal.”
Clayton Wolf, of Texas Parks and Wildlife, concurs. “Compared with deer, hogs have become harder to pattern, more erratic, and more responsive to hunting pressure,” he said. In other words, they figure out quickly that they are being hunted. There are more hogs now than there were back then, but as soon as you start shooting at them, they disappear and return only late at night, when they know humans are not around.
Another problem is that there are fewer hunters, on a percentage basis, than there used to be. Our state population has increased 48 percent since 1990, but the number of hunters in Texas has held steady at about one million. In relative terms, this represents a sharp decline, and it means that our hog problem cannot be solved by hunting alone. Of the dozen or so studies done on sport hunting’s effect on southern hog populations, hunters tend to remove, on average, about 25 percent of the pigs in a given area. According to Higginbotham, with the number of pigs in Texas today, “we need to remove about sixty or seventy percent annually just to hold the population stable.”
In addition to recreational hunting, there are a number of other effective options, all of which, with apologies to PETA, kill the hogs. In areas that are relatively open, aerial gunning, which involves a shooter with a semiautomatic rifle firing from a helicopter, can kill thirty to forty pigs per hour of flight time. Each hour costs the state or landowner about $800, but when you consider that a single feral hog is capable of doing about $200 in damage each year, that becomes a pretty good investment.
From an aesthetic point of view, however, it is unpleasant. Watching any of the videos available on YouTube, you quickly realize that the combination of a fast-moving hog and a fast-moving helicopter results in a lot of gut-shot animals. Hunters might cringe to see it, but for many landowners, this is a small price to pay for the removal of a noxious species. And whatever one thinks about aerial gunning, it’s a much more targeted approach (punning aside) and much better for the environment than using poison, which, like it or not, will be the next big public policy debate in hog control.
FACEBOOK
RSS
TUMBLR
TM
Read Later