Trapping Hogs

[jack.diamond]

Seems as though the hogs have migrated over to my place now. They are tearing up the back pastures something fierce. I am contemplating building the trap from the attached website. Would appreciate any additional ideas on the trap door.

Jack

http://agnews.tamu.edu/dailynews/storie ... c0505b.htm

 

[dun]

Seems as though the hogs have migrated over to my place now. They are tearing up the back pastures something fierce. I am contemplating building the trap from the attached website. Would appreciate any additional ideas on the trap door.

Jack

http://agnews.tamu.edu/dailynews/storie ... c0505b.htm

Would a smaller version work for dillers?

dun

 

[Caustic Burno]

Seems as though the hogs have migrated over to my place now. They are tearing up the back pastures something fierce. I am contemplating building the trap from the attached website. Would appreciate any additional ideas on the trap door.

Jack

http://agnews.tamu.edu/dailynews/storie ... c0505b.htm

Here is one of my homemade ones. Boogie probally has a better design but it works.

 

[Joy in Texas]

Jack this one of the home made traps that we use. As you can see we do need them.

 

[jack.diamond]

CB and Joy

Thanks for the pictures. I just wonder how many I will have to contend with. Do the doors on your traps work off a trip wire?

Jack

 

[Aaron]

What do you guys do with 'em after you trap them? Does a slaughter house take them or do you eat 'em yourselves?

 

[Nowland Farms]

Aaron,

I believe they sell the hogs to Caustic who turns them loose on his place so the city hunters will have something to shoot at when they go through his gates.

 

[sidney411]

There are places that will buy them but I usually butcher them myself and either keep the meat or give it away.

 

[Joy in Texas]

Yes ours work off of a trip. I'll take some better pictures in the morning,so you will get a better idea how it works ok.

 

[Caustic Burno]

I use the trigger out of a steel trap as a trigger, it is welded to the floor and a cable is hooked to the trigger. When they step on the trigger the door slides shut.

What I don't eat I shoot worse thing in the world is to turn a trap wise hog loose.

 

[Joy in Texas]

We eat or give the meat away. We never let one get away. They won't go near a trap after that. In the trap with the smaller ones.That was 9 or 10 pigs in there. We were on roll for awhile 2-3 nites a week we were trapping something. So you can imagine how many wild hogs was running on that place. Which they tore all to pieces. Useless animals....well maybe I should say very destructive animals

 

[backhoeboogie]

Jack,

I use traps with tops. Your big hogs will jump 6 foot walls. The little smart shoats will jump onto the back of another hog and then jump 6 foot walls. Once you see it, you believe it. Until then, it seems like something out of a cartoon and unbelieveable.

I use guilotine gates. My trip latch is a 32 inch piece of one inch tube steel cut in half. I weld a hinge on one side and a washer to one of the 16 inch pieces on the other side, for an eye. A cord goes through the washer (eye) to a pulley that takes the cord across the bottom of the trap. When a hog hits the trip cord, the tube steel folds in on the hinge away from the entry and toward the center of the trap.

Set the trip cord about 16 inches up. Pigs will enter, then a shoat or hog will enter and trip the string, catching them all.

The pen grid in the pictures is the right grid. Cow panels will not work. That design may catch a lot of hogs, but it will not work for me. What you have to bear in mind that many are simply satisfied with catching themselves some hogs. I am satisfied when I catch ALL of the hogs. If there are 150 hogs out there and I only catch 140, the remaining 10 will multiply exponentially. A hunter would be tickled with catching 50 and that trap design would be great for him.

Any hog that escapes a trap will become trap smart and difficult to catch. I do not take chances. That hog will continue to wreak havoc on my property and my investments. I am already marginal in making profits. I don't want to give meager profits to hogs, or anything else for that matter.

 

[jack.diamond]

Jack,

I use traps with tops. Your big hogs will jump 6 foot walls. The little smart shoats will jump onto the back of another hog and then jump 6 foot walls. Once you see it, you believe it. Until then, it seems like something out of a cartoon and unbelieveable.

I use guilotine gates. My trip latch is a 32 inch piece of one inch tube steel cut in half. I weld a hinge on one side and a washer to one of the 16 inch pieces on the other side, for an eye. A cord goes through the washer (eye) to a pulley that takes the cord across the bottom of the trap. When a hog hits the trip cord, the tube steel folds in on the hinge away from the entry and toward the center of the trap.

Set the trip cord about 16 inches up. Pigs will enter, then a shoat or hog will enter and trip the string, catching them all.

The pen grid in the pictures is the right grid. Cow panels will not work. That design may catch a lot of hogs, but it will not work for me. What you have to bear in mind that many are simply satisfied with catching themselves some hogs. I am satisfied when I catch ALL of the hogs. If there are 150 hogs out there and I only catch 140, the remaining 10 will multiply exponentially. A hunter would be tickled with catching 50 and that trap design would be great for him.

Any hog that escapes a trap will become trap smart and difficult to catch. I do not take chances. That hog will continue to wreak havoc on my property and my investments. I am already marginal in making profits. I don't want to give meager profits to hogs, or anything else for that matter.

BHB,

Thanks, I have seen where big hogs will go through a fence, but never thought they would go over one. When you trap hogs, how many traps do you set at one time in a given area?? My whole thought pattern was to make this trap big enough to catch the whole bunch. From the looks of the pastures and the size of the hoof prints, there are a lot. Big ones and small alike.

JD

 

[aplusmnt]

I know you guys in Texas should never have any starving people with all these wild hogs. You should start some program where you use them to feed the homeless or meat for school kids. Have heard of communities doing stuff like this with deer meat before.

 

[preston39]

Jack this one of the home made traps that we use. As you can see we do need them.

===
Joy...,

What do you use for bait?

How do you get the trap into the truck with several hundred pounds of varmant? ;-)

 

[backhoeboogie]

For bait I use whole corn soaked in diesel. I have still caught deer with the diesel on the corn. Luckily I have been able to get the deer out with no consequence. If I did not diesel the corn, I'd catch deer steadily.

Jack I have 4 remote traps. When I find holes I bait the holes and get the hogs coming regularly to the corn. Then I slip a trap in on them. I will reset that trap in that locale for up to a week then move it to another hole. I come back to holes that are productive. Hogs love earthworms and grub worms. If you find a good hole that has worms, acorns, pecans and such, the hogs will hit that hole routinely. You'll find rooted up cow pies and rooted up brush piles. They are getting worms from these locations. Slip some corn in there and bury a little of it.

Preston, I do not put hog traps in my truck. I pick the trap up with the front bucket of the Caterpillar, Backhoe, or the Massey tractor. I haul the trap to my holding pen, set the trap door to door with the pen and let them out into the pen. There is a divider with a remote guilotine gate. I open the guilotine gate from outside the pen and let the hogs into the main holding area from the dividing section. When I remove them live, I do the same thing in reverse.

When folks come to take one, I open the divider and let them into the side section, again with the remote rope. I cull them using the gate as a cut gate except it is a vertical guilotine gate. We pop one, let the other hogs back into the main enclosure and get it out of the divided section for processing. It is very efficient.

There is a hog feeder that holds 500 lbs of feed. The feed doors are in the main pen but the feeder itself is in the divided section. The feeder itself is tied down and I have cut one rung of panel for the feed doors to slide through into the main pen. I fill the feeder once a week when it is full of little pigs. Now that I am down to 8 shoats, I can go longer.

Hogs over 250 pounds bring 60 cents a pound at the buyer in Lingleville. There is a circuit that buys them and most of the meat goes to the northeastern U.S. Hogs weighing 150 to 250 lbs bring 30 cents a pound. You also get a "head bonus" which is down to $5 a head. (e.g. a 300 lb hog at 30 cents a pound fetches $90 for weight and $5 head bonus for a total of $95) Selling them to the circuit guarantees me that these things don't get sent to the exotic game preserves. I could make much more money on the trophy hogs if I sold them to the game places but they would eventually get back out into the wild and wreak havoc for some other farmer/rancher.

Individual hogs that leave my place to freinds, peers at work, and friends of friends, must be field dressed at my pens. Nothing leaves live. Most of these hogs are in the 60 to 80 lb proximity. I let go of some that are heavier but most are under 150 lbs.

The hogs I sell to the circuit give me enough nickels to buy feed for the feeder and corn for the traps. I am getting rid of hogs and not just shooting them and letting them go to the buzzards. There are many farmers who simply shoot them at the creep feeders and leave them.

TexasBoars has a good web site that used to be stocked with a host of info just like this forum but all of the old posts were lost. The site is back up and rebuilding.

Most all of my expertise has come from info at Texasboars and trial and error. I have been a hunter/trapper all my life but hog trapping is something I have only partaken in for the last few years. It is really no different than trapping fox or mink. You simply have to get to know the animal's habits and learn to think like they do. Hogs are the smartest critters out there in the wild. Don't be fooled. Don't get hurt either. Having a pen full of hogs is sort of like a pen full of rattlesnakes.

 

[backhoeboogie]

Everyone always wants to know, "What is the most you have caught in one trap, or in one night" etc. I think the most in one night is 15. The most I have ever caught in one trap is 13 and 10 of those were pigs about 15 lbs. In August I caught 45 head of swine. Most all of those were caught in one week. I work full time at a nuclear power plant, quarry stone part time, farm a little too. If I had the time to trap like I did when I was a kid, I could very eaily catch 200 to 300 a month. There are many good old folks around here who would like for me to trap their hogs. I simply don't have the time. I am trapping my neighbors place along with mine. She never allows hunting or anyone else to come on her place.

If you catch hogs and sell them to "game preserves", you are only contributing to the problem here in Texas. Game fences will not hold hogs.

 

[backhoeboogie]

The trap in Caustic's post and the trap in Joy's post are both good traps. The biggest mistake I see in box traps is that people use cow panel. Cow panel will not work. The hogs can get their heads through it. If a hog can get its head through the grid, he will tear the welded wire. Concrete mesh is terrible too and will not work. I buy "sheep panel" which has a 4 inch grid to build traps out of.

 

[aplusmnt]

How many hogs you think you have trapped in your lifetime so far?

 

[backhoeboogie]

How many hogs you think you have trapped in your lifetime so far?

I can only take a SWAG at that. I truly have no idea.