SPORTS

Hunter blasts 428-pound eating machine

Single hog could decrease food sources for native wildlife by thousands of pounds each year

Brian Broom
Clarion Ledger

A Meridian hunter wasn't seeing a lot of deer at his camp in Kilmichael last weekend. What he did see were wild pigs.

A 428-pound wild boar recently harvested by Larry Carman of Meridian sported 3-inch tusks.

"It was a little after five o'clock," Larry Carman said. "I had eight or ten pigs in front of me."

With an increasing population of pigs at his camp, the decision to try to reduce their numbers was an easy one to make, and Carman reached for his rifle.

"I got the gun through the window to shoot one of those and he stepped out," Carman said. "I honestly thought it was a big sow with some little ones."

With the big black boar quartering away from him, Carman put the crosshairs on the last rib and fired, but even after being hit with a .300 Winchester Magnum through the vitals, the pig kept going. Carman fired another shot with the hog running straight away from him and it fell into a depression and expired.

"I walked up to that thing and was like, 'Holy cow,'" Carman said. "I didn't realize how big that sucker was when I shot."

Earlier in the day, another camp member had harvested a giant pig.

"We nick-named him 'Pig Man' because it seems like every time he goes out, he sees one or kills one," Carmichael said. "We put that one on the scales and it was 290 (pounds). It didn't even compare to this one."

Muscle up

Carman called friends and got his Yamaha Rhino utility vehicle to retrieve the mountain of meat, but the job was a lot harder than expected. Carman said trying to load it with just three men was a complete failure.

Larry Carman of Meridian said it took two shots from his .300 Winchester Magnum rifle to put down this 428-pound wild boar.

"Three of us couldn't budge it," Carman said. "Five people loaded it in the back of my Yamaha Rhino.

"It took all of us to get the hindquarters in the back. The weight limit was maxed out on my Rhino."

Once at the skinning room, Carman was in for another shock.

"I couldn't believe it," Carman said. "We winched him up and none of us could believe it.

"When he went over 400 (pounds) I was just shocked. While we were taking pictures of him, the 'S' hooks on the scale started to straighten out."

Like Carman's Rhino, the boar also almost maxed out his 440-pound scale. It weighed 428 pounds and had a set of frightening tusks.

"I didn't measure them, but I would say they are about 3 inches," Carman said. "They were really sharp and they weren't broken, either. They were razor-sharp."

Deer season 2015-16: Hot and cold

An eating machine

According to Bronson Strickland, Mississippi State University Deer Lab Associate Extension Professor, wild hogs don't eat a lot more than deer and other animals when you compare the percentage of food intake to their body weights.

"Typically, the way we think about it, deer, sheep and other non-pig animals is three to five percent," Strickland said. "Probably a good estimation for pigs is four to five percent."

In other words, a 100-pound doe will eat about three to five percent of her body weight daily, or three to five pounds of food a day. A 100-pound wild pig will consume about four to five pounds a day. In the case of Carman's 428-pound boar, those numbers can be staggering.

If Carman's boar ate five percent of his body weight daily, that would be 21.4 pounds of resources. Over a period of thirty days, that would be 642 pounds of wild groceries. Over a period of one year, that number climbs to 7,811 pounds of food resources consumed by a single hog. To put that volume of food into perspective, it is roughly the equivalent 156 50-pound bags of corn, or about five pickup bed loads.

For that reason, hunters are encouraged to neutralize wild pigs, especially sows, whenever possible.

"Think about acorns," Strickland said. "Think about the mast that will be consumed.

"These are things that won't go to squirrels, wood ducks, turkeys and deer. This is all going into a pigs belly."

Contact Brian Broom at (601) 961-7225 or bbroom@gannett.com. Follow The Clarion-Ledger Outdoors on Facebook and @BrianBroom on Twitter.