Awesome. That's a huge hog.

Sometimes those big ones taste bad. How was he?

How much are your hunts??? Lol. But seriously I will do anything to go after hogs like that.

Those are awesome get those videos up quick

OW! My balls!

Holy shit those are huge.  They don't get that big around here

You should see our women

Those are seriously big hogs though

ETA: OP, would you mind letting us know if that was North, Central, or South Fl?  Just curious since I've seen some of the largest come from south Ga.

Yeah somebodies gonna be enjoying a big plate of rocky mountain oysters

Nice, what length barrel on that 308?

ughhh dont eat that.

Save your pot for the little ones.

Don't worry, 550 pounds of pork were personally delivered to the University of Florida Animal Sciences Meat Quality Laboratory today where it is being professionally processed and packaged into 550 pounds of smoked sausages by the undergrad and graduate students in the Meat Quality Laboratory where I used to teach when I was in Veterinary School 35 years ago!

That is a SIG 716 with 16" barrel shooting 130 grain Barnes TSX handloads.












Hits 'yotes hard too @ 240 yards:

I always wondered how you zeroed thermal.  Light your target on fire?

Learned something new.

A .308 shell casing heated up by a butane lighter works good too, stick the empty end into the target and heat up the primer end.

Are these tame or domesticated hogs?

By looking at the screenshots from this thread and Skypup's thread, it appears that Hog #1 was shot at 8:19 p.m. (7:42pm on the MKII DVR)

Hog #1 hit and the other pigs scramble:


About 3 minutes later, Hog #2 is shown munching corn beside a recently expired Hog #1. By comparing the time stamps of the two DVR's in what looks to be the same frame (or at least close) I'm assuming that the time stamp for the RS is about 38 minutes ahead of the MKII:



Going off of the screenshots, the pigs remained in the same location for at least ~ 45 minutes (8:11pm - 8:54pm) while being observed and recorded through two different thermal scope/DVR setups, different color palettes, and multiple levels of zoom, not to mention being shot at.

First screenshot at 8:11pm:


First screenshot with the MKII at 8:15pm (7:37pm on the MKII DVR)


Hog #2 still alive at 8:54pm (8:16pm on the MKII DVR)


Maybe hogs act differently in Florida than they do here in Texas, but it just doesn't seem like the typical behavior of a wild or feral hog. Especially for really large hogs, which have to be either very smart or very lucky to survive long enough to grow that big.

Also, I noticed that a person in one of the pictures is wearing a Tiger Island Outfitters T-Shirt. A quick google search revealed that the Tiger Island Outfit location is a 28-acre fenced-in property and is quite narrow. That would seem to explain why the pigs didn't run very far after being shot at.



Maybe I'm confused about how it all went down and the DVR footage will clear things up, but as it stands, it doesn't make sense to me based on my experience hunting hogs.

Rich, we have State hog trapper licenses and trap and transport feral hogs to a variety of different places around here, one of them is family owned Tiger Island Outfitters in Cedar Key, Florida about 60 miles due west of us. Cedar Key is a coastal island right on the Gulf of Mexico and has some great seafood restaurants, but out of the tiny town it is tens of thousands of miles of private hunts clubs and National Wildlife Refuges. We supply these outfitters with a lot of their feral hogs and know them well since we go there so often to release our trapped wild hogs. No one has ever hunted at night over there so we asked them if we could film a couple of hog kills at night with a variety of thermal gear that we use with the idea seeing how some of our thermals work under identical conditions.

I think we were there about two hours, not sure about the time and your questions about the time stamps since I was not paying any attention to any of that, but I brought my FLIR M-18 handheld scanner, FLIR M-24 helmet mounted scanner, IRD M-300 helmet mounted scanner, FLIR LS-XR handheld scanner, FLIR LS-64 handheld scanner, FLIR PS-32 handheld scanner, FLIR RS64-35mm thermal scope, FLIR RS32-35mm thermal scope, and IRD MKII-35m thermal scope with the idea of filming and shooting hogs at the exact same distance and the exact same time under the exact same environmental circumstances with the exact same DVRs. I also wanted to film simultaneously with my helmet mounted FLIR 640 core M-24 and IRD 640 core M-300 to get representative video out them, but the DVR setup did not work out with them, we'll get that another time when we go back to get some Night Vision scope, laser, etc. videos later. It's a big hassle having all that gear and trying to set it all up all at the same time and have everything working properly due to dead batteries, bad connections, etc. in the field, bringing all the Night Vision gear with us would have just been too much to handle. I did have everything all charged up and connected and still had batteries die on me that took a long time to change out in the dark and bad DVR connections. But, with all that thermal gear and video recorders you can expect something to go wrong at the wrong time when you are trying to get it all working simultaneously!

Of course, all the different thermal instruments have different adjustments and different settings as well as lenses, microbolometers, visual display drivers, etc.

You can readily see the different FOVs in some of the photos from the various instruments since they are at the same time of the same animals at the same distance.

As you can readily see in some of the pics, at the common night shooting distance of 100 yards, you can easily put down most anything you want using a 320 core thermal scope without a problem, which we did and recorded it on the thermals.

We have allot more video from allot more instruments than the pictures you are asking about, the pics here that you are asking about only show the FLIR RS32-35mm and the IRD MKII-35mm....We will get allot more video/pics when we go back with all the night vision gear next time too.

Big....pigs

Here are some pics of the giant feral hogs from the FLIR M-18 handheld, did not have the objective lens quite focused for the distance but still turned out pretty good!


















If you look at some of the pics you may notice that the time-stamps on all the different DVRs are different, some are even different days from forgetting to set them properly after charging them up....Ah Wah, so it goes.

?


What's not to like, the 3.5GB of thermal video or the 550 pounds of sausage for the SEC championship game?

Here are some pics from the FLIR LS-XR handheld thermal at the same time although the time stamp may state some other day or time depending on which DVR was being used:

Another great post!

Damn, you are going to have to make it down here from the beautiful Suwanee River valley now that you are back from the Sand Pit!


Let me know next time you all are down this way and we will get together at Naps and do some hunting at my place.


BTW, we also provide wild hogs to the Suwanee River Ranch Hunting Preserve in Branford too, awesome people there on the river!


http://www.suwanneeriverranch.com/

Skypup, thank you for the clarification. Were these two pigs wild hogs that you trapped?

 

Meh, there are various degrees of feral or wild.  I wouldn't get too worked up about it man.

I had no idea about that at first Rich, it was total darkness at night when we got there and once on our stand I did not know what hog was what at all in the dark, nor did I know that these bastards were so damn big until we winched them up on the weigh scale, from seeing them in the thermals, we figured they were 300-350 pounds or so.

Looking at them back at the weigh house, I can say that they did not look like any that we had trapped recently. We did specifically thermally target hogs that had balls instead of tits and they had some rather large ones at that, about as big as a TNVC hat as a matter of fact!

The Ford F-250 rode quite stiffly with just two hogs in the back on the hour long ride back to my ranch to butcher them up and take them over to the Veterinary School Meat Lab.

Just an FYI, we have hog traps all over a couple of counties at numerous municipal airports, regional electrical power generators, county/state parks, country clubs, golf courses, upscale gated communities, private farms and ranches. As such we work with our County Sheriff Deputies, State Fish and Game Officers, Park Managers, Home/Farm Owner Associations, Airport Security, Utility Managers, Cattle ranchers, Horse Farms, and just about anyone else that has problems from being overrun by feral hogs.

95% of the hogs that we trap are the original Spanish conquistadors piney woods rooter type wild hogs that were left here over 500 years ago by Ferdinand De Soto, Ponce De Leon, and the numerous Spanish, English, and French colonizers. Many of hogs live in protected wilderness wildlife refuges and are destroying the rare/natural fauna and flora and that is the reason they are considered pests/vermin and we are allowed to trap/hunt them 24/7/365 with any firearm it is legal to own, including all NFA items properly licensed.

As far as knowing anything about swine, I graduated from Veterinary School in 1982 and have advanced graduate degrees in Infectious Diseases of Wildlife and Virology and have traveled around the world to work at various private and National game preserves on every continent besides Antarctica.

Rich,

I would not worry too much about wild versus domesticated.  One look at those pigs and you can tell they aren't the ferocious wild boar many are after.  But if you want a big pig, they've got 'em.  Skypup, good work!

One word.................yummy  

This...those hogs may be in the "wild", but have way too many domestic traits to be called wild hogs.Snout is a dead giveaway.