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.
