The call came at six in the morning from a man named Darrell who owns the bottom field on the other side of the creek. He didn’t say hello. He said, “There’s thirty of ’em out here and they already tore up an acre of my beans. Bring something.” I have never dressed faster in my life.
Feral hogs are the one animal down here a man can shoot on a Tuesday and feel zero guilt about. They tear up pasture, they root up crops, they eat fawns and turkey eggs, and they breed fast enough that you could shoot one every day of your life and not put a dent in them. So when Darrell called, I didn’t think about it. I threw my rifle in the truck and I went. What I did not pack was a plan for what happened after I pulled the trigger. That is the part that bit me.
The Shot Was the Easy Part
I will spare you the heroics because there weren’t any. I sat a fence line while the light came up, found a big sow feeding broadside at about eighty yards, and put one right behind her shoulder. She dropped in her tracks, the rest of the sounder scattered into the creek bottom, and just like that I had a dead hog on the ground and no earthly idea what to do with it.
That’s the thing about hogs nobody tells you when you’re a deer hunter. You spend your whole life learning how to field dress a whitetail. You can do it in your sleep, up the gut, cut the diaphragm, pull the windpipe out, drop the guts in the grass, done. A hog is not a deer. A hog is a slab of something closer to a farm pig with a mean streak, and if you gut it like a deer you are about to learn a lesson you will taste for the next three months.
I Gutted It Like a Deer and I Regretted It Immediately
I won’t drag you through the whole ugly process, but I’ll tell you the part that mattered. I hung that sow by her back legs, split her open from sternum to pelvis the way I’d done a hundred deer, and I let the guts swing out and hit the ground. And that’s when the smell hit me.
Hog guts smell different. Deer guts have that gamey, iron, sawdust-and-autumn smell you get used to after a while. A hog’s insides smell like a busted septic line behind a barbecue joint. Hot and sour and sweet all at once, and it clings to your hands in a way that soap does not fix for two days. I was standing there holding a knife with my eyes watering, thinking, this is why every hog hunter I know wears rubber gloves up to the elbow. I was not wearing rubber gloves. I was wearing my good field jacket. That jacket lived in the bed of the truck for the rest of the year.
Worse than the smell, though, was what I did next. I did not know about the scent glands. A wild hog has a set of them, and if you leave them on the meat or bust them open while you’re working, they will soak into every pound you take home. I cut right through one on the way down the belly and I did not even know I’d done it. I just kept going, humming along like the expert I absolutely was not.
The Cooler Was Full of Fat
Back home, I dumped the quarters in a cooler full of ice and water and congratulated myself on a job well done. I had a hundred and forty pounds of free pork or so, and I’d saved Darrell’s beans, and I was already picturing the sausage. Then I opened that cooler a few days later to start cutting and found out what I actually had.
Wild hog is not a pig you raised on corn. A feral hog carries a lot less fat than a farm pig, and what fat it does have is a different color and a different flavor. Some of it is fine. Some of it, especially on an old boar, is rank enough to ruin every ounce of meat it touches. I had shot a big sow, so I was in better shape than the guy who shoots a two hundred pound boar, but I still didn’t know the difference between the good fat and the bad, and I didn’t trim near enough of it. I ground the whole thing, fat and all, mixed in the lean like I was making hamburger.
The first sausage I browned smelled like the inside of that hog’s guts. The second batch wasn’t much better. I told my wife it was “just wild flavor” and watched her push it around her plate with a fork and not say anything, which is the polite way a good woman calls you a liar.
What a Hog Actually Wants From You
I’ve butchered a pile of hogs since that first mess, and I’ve learned a few things the hard way, which is the only way I seem to learn anything. Here’s what I wish somebody had told me before I pulled the trigger that morning.
Take the backstraps and hams and leave the rest if it’s hot. Hogs spoil faster than deer, especially in warm weather, and a big old boar is a lot of work for not much good meat. If it’s ninety degrees and I shoot a hog, I take the backstraps and the hindquarters and I don’t lose sleep over the rest. There are more hogs where that one came from. There always are.
Trim every bit of fat you can reach. This is the rule I break when I’m tired and I always regret it. Wild hog fat is not bacon fat. It’s not even close. Cut it out, throw it away, or render it slow for trap bait and dog food, but do not grind it into your breakfast sausage. A lean hog is a good hog. The fat is where the bad taste lives.
Check the scent glands before you start and cut around them. A sow has them and a boar has them and they’re not hard to find if you know to look, but if you don’t know, you’ll split one open and flavor the whole animal by accident. It took me a ruined cooler of meat to learn that lesson, and now I find them every time before I make my first cut.
Cook wild pork like you mean it. Hogs run wild in the dirt, and wild pork can carry more than farm pork does. I cook hog to a firm, well-done, no pink in the middle, and I don’t apologize for it. Trichinella is real, and the old-timers who cook hog low and slow until it pulls apart weren’t being cautious for no reason.
The Batch That Finally Turned Out
The second hog I shot, I did it different. I quartered it in the field and packed it straight onto ice instead of letting it swing. I trimmed every scrap of yellow fat off the hams and shoulders until I was looking at clean, dark red meat. I found the scent glands and took them out whole. Then I made a simple smoked sausage with maybe a quarter deer mixed in to lean it out, and I cooked a patty in the pan before I committed the whole batch.
It was good. Clean and porky and just a little wild, like a pig that spent its whole life doing whatever it wanted, which is exactly what it was. My wife ate three links and went back for a fourth without being asked, and that, more than anything else I’ve done in a kitchen, felt like absolution for the first one.
So here’s the whole lesson in one line, and I’ll give it to you for free, which is more than that first cooler of ruined sausage cost me. A feral hog is some of the best and most underrated meat walking, and killing one is the easy half of the job. The hard half is treating it like what it is, which is not a deer, not a farm pig, and not a shortcut. Dress it clean, trim the fat like your dinner depends on it, because it does, and for the love of everything, wear gloves.
You’ll smell better in the truck on the way home, and your jacket will thank you.