Editor’s Note: No better sport exists for the bowhunter than hog hunting. You can hunt hogs throughout the South and in parts of the West at any time during the year, and you can bag as many hogs as you want, due to the destruction feral pigs cause to crops, their contamination of water supplies and their preying on ground nesting birds’ eggs, turkey poults, turkey hens sitting on their nests and just-born fawns. By using feeders and cameras, you can pinpoint where the hogs are moving and use the feeders to bait them, as most states allow you to bait hogs (check your local regulations). Whether you’re hunting in the thick palmettos of Florida, the oak brush of Texas and/or the briarpatches of Mississippi, you can pull ravenous wild porkers out of thick cover by baiting your feeder with corn. 

Toxey Haas, the creator of Mossy Oak camouflage (https://www.mossyoak.com/) from West Point, Mississippi, hates hogs but loves to hunt them. “Hogs compete with deer and turkey for food, root up and destroy my green fields and roads and are a general nuisance,” Haas says. “Hogs may be bad for the land, but they’re great for the bowhunter.” On a bowhunt for wild hogs, Haas had glassed a green field and spotted several hogs less than 250-yards away. “I saw seven hogs feeding in the field,” Haas explains. “One of the pigs looked like a sow weighing approximately 150 pounds.  I knew a pig that size would be delicious to eat.” With the wind in his favor, Haas crept within 70 yards of the feeding hogs as they moved down the edge of the field. Before he could take one with his bow, however, the hogs turned toward the woods.

Knowing he would lose the opportunity to take a hog unless he could turn them back, Haas reached into his pocket for a Knight and Hale EZ Grunter Xtreme Deer Call (https://www.knightandhale.com/game-calls). “You can blow in and out fast on this deer-grunt call to produce the sound of an excited hog,” Haas advises. “After grunting once, I saw a boar hog lift his head and push a small pig toward me before going back to feeding. I grunted again on this deer call with its patented Hyper-Ventilator design, and this time the sow began walking toward me.”

Relying on the grunt call, Haas lured the sow within 30 yards of his hiding spot in the tall grass. As the sow leaned her head down to root, Haas drew his bow and delivered the arrow squarely behind the pig’s shoulder. “Earlier in the year, I watched a boar and a sow together,” Haas reports. “The boar grunted quickly when he tried to breed the sow. Listening to the boar’s sound, I thought I could reproduce that sound with the EZ Grunter with its Hyper-Ventilator inhale/exhale technology. Since I began using the deer-grunt call on hogs, I’ve taken more than 12 hogs with my bow. When you give that exciting sound on a deer call, the hogs can’t resist coming in to investigate.”

Haas admits excited grunting will bring in young pigs easier and better than it will old boars.  He also mentions that like any other form of calling, hog calling doesn’t always work. “However, calling hogs does work at times,” Haas explains. “That’s why I carry a deer-grunt call with me anytime I go into the woods in search of hogs.”

Another Hog Call:

Because of the growing popularity of hunting wild hogs, Will Primos of Primos Hunting (https://www.primos.com/) in Jackson, Mississippi, has developed a Hog Grunter and a Hog Squealer. A social beast by nature, a hog will investigate any grunting it hears. “Because of the hog’s herding instinct, any hog will often come to a grunt call,” explains Jimmy Primos, Chief Operating Officer. “The Hog Grunter has the same effect as the deer grunt in that it will bring in both sexes of hogs.”

Relying on his knowledge of deer calls, Will Primos experimented with the distress calls made by hogs. Knowing deer would respond when they heard a fawn’s distress bleat, Primos reasoned that hogs also would react to the frantic squealing of a distressed young pig. He soon learned that the Hog Squealer he created often lured in older, bigger hogs, pulling them out of heavy cover to allow a bowhunter a shot.

To learn more about bowhunting, check out John E. Phillips’ eBook, “Bowhunting Deer: The Secrets of the PSE Pros” at http://amzn.to/VBr1qW. You also can download a free Kindle app that enables you to read the book on your iPad, computer or SmartPhone.

Tomorrow: Why Use Bowhunting Hogs to Test Equipment