So I went to check my trap yesterday and had 2! A 80# boar and 120# sow.  The sow was missing one of her rear feet. Cut off very clean and healing right below the lower knee. I thought either it had been shot off or been caught in an old school steel trap and cut off.  When we got to the processor, the kid working there told me guys trap the hogs, cut a foot off, and let them go so that their dogs can track or trail them. WHAT THE HELL!  Have any of you ever heard of this?

If you're going to kill something, kill it and do it clean.

Unless it's a communist.

Never heard of cutting the foot off.  Catching them with dogs, castrating, then letting them go so you can come get them back in a year or two is fairly common.  Poachers, most likely kids, used to do it around my lease.  It was great when I got the hog a few years later.

Houndsmen come up with some off the wall stuff! I wouldn't doubt some older Hound runner telling some younger hound runner that it would make training hid dogs easier. Just to see if the youngin would do it. Steel traps very seldom cut the leg off, Because you want the critter there for the fur. It could have gotten it hung in a fence and chewed it off or an old foot hold snare that cut the circulation off. Besides most pigs pull right out of a regular coyote trap unless caught above the dew claw.

Killed a big old boar once with a missing lower leg as you describe.
When I showed it to my neighbor he told me he had found a leg in his hog trap several months prior,
the hog had gotten tangled in the trip wire inside the trap and cut its leg off and fought its way out of the trap.
This was a pretty big boar, and this guys traps are kinda flimsy homemade things so I figured it was probably the same hog.

Incidentally, the boar also had a .22 bullet lodged in his lung that looked to be much older than the leg wound, 3 legs - a bullet in his lung -
and it still took a round from a.243 win and a load of 12 g buckshot to finish him, tough old bastard he was.

I shot one once with a 25-06.  I took the head and buried it to get all the flesh off. Months later when I dug it up and started cleaning the skull, noticed a bullet hole between the eyes. I did not shoot it there. The hole had new bone growth over it as it tried to heal.  The hole was not all the way to the brain cavity.  Im guessing a handgun round that did not kill it, maybe a 38.  The one missing the foot I had to shoot 4 times with a 9mm to put it down.

More than likely she was caught in a foot snare. I have checked my traps and have found a hogs foot left in the snare before it happens. I prefer the kill snare it strangles the hog when on an eradication contract I check the traps in the morning and evening and it's more successful that hunting with firearms.

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I have been a Hogger for 40 years and I kill hogs in the traps with a .22 LR one shot in the head.

Hum, I shoot them with a .22 LR in the Head and it only takes one yea they kick but no more than 2 minutes. I shot this Hog caught in a Boar Buster Trap with a .22LR  and just one put this 587-pound hog down.

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