We have recently become over run with hogs on our land. Trapping no longer works, and shooting them doesn't seem to help. Any recommendations?

Why do suppose the trapping isn't working?
Do you mean, they won't come to traps or you just aren't making a dent with the traps?

Break down and buy the gate and electronics from Elkhunter. Whole sounder trapping is where it's at, they'll definitely get trap shy with smaller traps.

Have Gun will travel...

We weren’t making a dent with the traps, and now they avoid the traps all together. I don’t have the funds to keep buying traps either. @longshot I’m not sure what you mean by your post.

How much land do you have. If it’s enough I will bring the dogs after deer season. I hunt on the river in Choctaw county. I caught 196 hogs this year in 26 hunts off 3 spots.

Give me a call if you are interested. 251-428-0374 Caleb Kirkland

That means I would be more than happy to come assist you with taking out a few after deer season of coarse

CBonner15 where are you located?

Butler Al

A good friend of mine catches them with dogs. If you’re interested in having him come catch some, give him a call or text him. His name is Marc Hughes, numbers ‭(850) 454-5464‬. He wouldn’t want money or anything, he just really enjoys catching them and is dang good at it

2 options imo. Trap them or get another piece of property. You are going to have to catch the entire Sounders to see a difference.

You gotta move them traps too. Can't leave them in the same place.
Mix it up.

False.... You have been drinking to much of Elkhunters koolaid. Lol. I hunt a track of land with dogs that started out loaded with hogs after turkey season to now you have to search far and wide to just find a track. They will move back in between now and the end of turkey season and i will get started again. But its a losing battle either way because to the north of the property is a 5000acre breeding ground that no one hog hunts or traps.

I am not drinking anyone's cool aid. The pigs set up shop and stay until manually removed where I hunt. You hunting them and running them with dogs may make them move but we dont want to chase them around we just want to kill them so we trap the entire group. Eventually another group will move in but it is normally a few months before it happens. I am fixing to remove the most recent group from our place and we will be hog free again for a bit

Killing 196 in 26 hunts is far from just chasing hogs around. I can do the same thing with dogs in less time as you can with a trap. There is no prebaiting or waiting till the hogs get brave enough to go in a trap. And It doesn’t cost the land owner a few grand for someone with “Good Dogs” to catch them like one of those traps cost. I’m not gonna be like y’all fancy trap guys and claim my way is the only way. Trapping and Dogs are both effective ways to control hog population. Each has there up sides and down sides. It all depends on the way the land owner wants to handle it.

I have killed every hog on the property except 4 in 5 drops of the gate. That's only 81 but it has not been difficult. The trap takes 2 hrs to set up, it normally takes 4 bags of corn and less than a week to catch. My first drop caught 38 pigs required 2 trips to bait trap and 4 days waiting until the entire group was inside at once. If dogs are that efficient I am greatly impressed. The ones I have seen hunt with dogs (not you obviously) are not that efficient, not quiet and not painless for the hog.

We had some property in plantersville where I nicknamed the hogs "Nomads".
They would show up in late August to September and we'd trap or shoot them through spring.
Then they would completely disappear through the summer, and show up again in September.
Year after year, same routine.

"I can do the same thing with dogs in less time as you can with a trap." I guess the Devil is in the details. In order for this statement to be true you have to be counting the time the trap is set and waiting. In no way will you ever do it in "Less Time" simply counting man hours. But, don't let me get in the way of a good story. LOL

Just so we all understand what I’m saying with my previous comment.

Say you have a group of 10 hogs show up on your property (not swamp land that is loaded with hogs). You have option A or option B.

Option A: You pay $3000 or more for a trap. You go set it up, Prebait it and wait for the hogs to get use to it if they ever get use to it. When the stars all align and they are all in the trap if you can ever get them all in the trap you drop the gate. That may take months for that to happen depending on if the property has ever had much trapping pressure. So not counting bait, gas, or time you are at $300 per hog on price and who knows how long it has been so those sows have now dropped a litter of pigs while all this waiting is going on.

Option B: You call ole Dog hunter Bob down the road to bring his 4 cur dogs and a catch dog to meet you Saturday morning. Saturday morning You pull up to the field they were in last night and turn out and we will say you catch 4 that morning. Then ole dog hunter bob goes to church Sunday but after he gets off work Monday evening and he goes back and catches 3 of the remaining 6. Now just to keep this story fair we will say those last 3 got pressured to much and they disappeared from the property.

Now correct me if I’m wrong but with option A the landowner spends a good bit of money and possibly does a lot of waiting.

Option B on the other hand the landowner only has to pay his phone bill for the month and in less than a week he has 7 dead hogs and 3 Missing in Action.

Don’t get me wrong I know as well as anyone that you can’t just let anybody with dogs loose on your place and expect good results but if you ask around and get a reputable dog man to come hunt your place you will have good results.

Notice in all of that I never said that trapping wasn’t effective.
Every tactic has its place and I have nothing to gain from pushing one method or the other. I simply love to kill hogs by any means although I’m partial to watching dogs work.

Bayed up you are not comparing apples to apples. You are comparing a finished product dogs to a process of trapping. Compare em both in their entirety and it looks more like this.

Say I have a group of 10 hogs show up on your property (not swamp land that is loaded with hogs). You have option A or option B.

Option A: You pay $3000 or more for a trap. You go set it up, Prebait it and wait a week. When the stars all align and they are all in the trap you drop the gate.

Currently I am at $40 a hog all expenses have been paid and no more will arise and my cost per hog will only decrease. (Ben2 actual cost of hogs in 1 yr)

Option B: You call ole Dog hunter and ask if he has any dogs for sale. You buy 4 of them for $1000 you buy dog food, shock collars, GPS collars, kennels spend 100 hrs training them then when they are ready you take them to the property where the 10 hogs have become 85 hogs and you catch 3. $333.33 per hog. Then a hog kills dog 2 and we have to buy a new dog 2 and start over again. The cost per hog continues to rise.

Now correct me if I’m wrong but with option A the landowner spends a good bit of money and possibly does a lot of waiting. While the dog owner spends a lot of money and does more waiting with less results.


Obviously you kill the piss out of hogs but 1 dog cant kill the number 1 trap can
It's not feasible and not a fair comparison the trap is run by humans the trap does not make errors.
While a dog is a dog and makes mistakes and is a 1 pig at a time option. Both are good but not equal or even close

The guys who hunt hogs with dogs have a couple of weeks in February and then May through September to hunt generally speaking. I have spoken to several guys who hunt with dogs in our general area and in 2018 they killed well over 3000 hogs. None of them charged anyone a dime.
The trapping vs. shooting vs. dog hunting has been debated on this site in the past, and the same things hold true now as then. All 3 methods will work when the hog population is high in an area, but as the population goes down so does the success with any method. I have personally never seen hogs totally eradicated from a property by any of these 3 methods of hunting.

You definitely don’t have a clue how guys with true hog dogs work. You aren’t gonna call a dog man and get him to sell his dogs. You aren’t gonna buy a hog dog worth shooting for $1000 much less 4. And if a dog is for sale then he has a problem somewhere waiting for you to find it. Not to mention a guy with 10 hogs isn’t going to go buy dogs. That would make no sense. He wouldn’t have anything to hunt in less than a week. That would be almost as stupid as him spending $3000 on a trap for 10 hogs. If he had a hunt able population of hogs then it would be a different story. You and I both can spin this anyway we want and the only difference is I am saying that everything that ends with dead hogs is a valuable piece of the puzzle when trying to control the population and you are saying you’re way is the only way and everyone should go buy a $3000 trap instead of working with people that simply want to help for “FREE” or in my case pay to catch hogs. I gave you a example where both options would work one option was free and effective and the other was expensive and effective. And you came back with an example that option B made absolutely no sense for the landowner to do.

My point was dogs are not free and in fact to the owner are more expensive than the trap. I guess offering to put my trap up for the land owner with 10 hogs and not charging him would be the same as you taking your dogs to the property. I just contend that the odds of a trap catching 10 hogs with minimal intrusion on the property is more viable than people with dogs running, baying, killing. Either way is fine. The hunters with dogs I know of that hunt some friends places are satisfied with the dogs running the hogs off their properties. They do kill a few hogs but they tell me the pressure of the dogs running them pushes them off the property for a time and that is the result they desire.

You are 100% correct Ben2. Dogs and all the equipment associated with hunting hogs with dogs are very expensive, but the point is if you ask a hunter with dogs to come catch some hogs off your property it won't cost you a dime. Another thing you are right about is that hogs that are hunted with dogs will feel pressured and move to another area even if they avoid being caught.
No method is the end all for removing hogs. If someone has hogs and the money to buy a trap or to pay someone to trap them, a dent will probably be put in the population but they wont all be caught. Nobody is gonna catch'em all with dogs either, and you definitely can't shoot'em all.
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I don’t want to read through all this, so I may ask questions already answered.

1. What kind of traps were being used?
2. Were catching parts of groups or the whole sounder?
3. Are you open to dogging?
4. Do your neighbors participate in the hog “management” process?


To be successful you have to use every tool in the toolbox, not just one or two. Trapping, shooting, and dogging all used together with a plan with neighbors and you can have truly significant impacts on hog numbers.

What type of traps were you using?

What kind of traps?

Breaker, Breaker,,Calling Don Bradford...you out there? This is your kind of thread! Come Back

I'll hazard a guess and say root door or guillotine door style traps. They catch a few, then the others stand outside the trap and see what happened.

Trapping quit being effective? I bet it did. Hogs are some of the smartest animals in the wild and a standard trap as described above probably "educates" 2 hogs for every one you catch. Once they are trap shy, only a dog or one of Elkhunter's traps (and a bunch of patience) will get them.

Nighthunter (likely one of the most knowledgeable posters still active on AlDeer) has it right. There is no one way to treat a hog problem, although there can be several wrong ones. Every (effective) method should be employed.

Don is a thermal guy now. He has switched camps! LOL

I think he done like a lot of older dog men has done. When his old Shiner dog died his interest did to.