Texas Hog Hunting Night & Day Setups | Cable Smith

Hog hunting is a true public service for land owners in places like Texas. Hogs tear into crops, buildings, waterways and all kinds of other places they shouldn’t. People like Cable Smith help out their neighbors by hunting these boars down whenever they can. Hog hunting where it’s hot, like Texas, the best time to hunt is at night. However, the hogs still come out in the heat so having a daytime and a night time hog hunting setup is the best way for Texas hog hunters to drop as many pigs as possible. Hog hunters in Texas usually use bait of some kind to bring in hogs so Cable Smith’s shares what he uses to bait the big hogs in.

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Gear Mentioned:
Coyote America Book http://bit.ly/A-Coyote_America
Pulsar Thermion XP50 1.9-15.2x42mm Thermal Rifle Scope http://bit.ly/GW-Pulsar_Thermion_Scope
Mossberg Patriot Synthetic Cerakote 6.5 Creedmoor http://bit.ly/M-Mossberg-Patriot
Hornady 6.5 Creedmoor 140gr ELD Match Ammunition, 20 Round Box http://bit.ly/GW-Horandy_Creedmore_Ammo
Pulsar Helian Monocular http://bit.ly/GW-Pulsar_Helian_Monocular
Western Rivers Fred Eichler Game Call http://bit.ly/GW-Eichler_Game_Call
Winchester Short Magnum, .270 WSM, BST, 130 Grain, 20 Rounds http://bit.ly/GW-Winchester_270_Ammo
Winchester Deer Season Xp 300 Winchester Magnum Ammo http://bit.ly/GW-Winchester_300_Ammo
Wildgame Innovations Tri-Pod Deer Feeder http://bit.ly/GW-Tri-Pod
STI 1911 Ranger II .45 http://bit.ly/SF-1911_Ranger_45

Show Notes: Cable Smith's Show: https://lonestaroutdoorshow.com/

Transcription

Brad: if you're playing holiday host this year is anything more important than serving up the perfect christmas ham yes actually I would argue you should consider your shot placement hog bait your optics and your proper sidearm if you're still in an eggnog fog and haven't figured it out yet that means today's show is all about wild hogs we're talking pigs spores swine porkers I've got radio host podcaster and proud texan Cable smith on the show and we are talking all about his hog hunting setup he's breaking down the gear he uses to pop pigs but before I go on quick announcement from GoWild for the rest of 2020 every time you use your GoWild app on your phone to share it with a friend and they install it you're going to get a chance to win a garmin fenix I'm gonna drop the link in the show notes on how to do this but just know every time you share and every time a friend comes on board you get a chance to win a garmin watch you're literally getting free chances to win a watch that's worth $700 somebody's got to win it might as well be you alright back to the boards this is Gearbox Talk with Cable smith

cable smith we're going to talk about something today that I literally know nothing about I've never even attempted to hog hunt I'm in kentucky we thankfully don't have them but I'm looking forward to talking to you about it and learning about them

Cable: I think someday you will have them I would well

Brad: actually I say we don't have them we don't have them right here I have heard they're here I actually know someone who lives north of me who has had them and he's had his farm destroyed by them so I guess they're here in theory but I'm not hunting them at this point

Cable: very interesting people are finding out that they're more adaptable to extreme cold weather than was previously thought so

Brad: well a lot of them come from russia right aren't isn't that with the genetic his origin of some of these yeah

Cable: russian boars yeah yeah and you can see you can see that characteristic even if they've been bred time and time again you know through bloodlines that that russian boar looks distinctly different than just your everyday feral hog

Brad: yeah it's like is it brindle's what comes to mind but it's not necessarily a brindle right it's like but it's like a multi-colored look to it right coarser hair hair sometimes you know that razorback feature and the facial features just doesn't I mean domesticated hogs just they just have a different look than yeah i'd say they look meaner like just

Brad: yeah man we're kind of hitting on what I wanted to ask you about first you know gearbox talk

try to help the newbies out with with what we can maybe maybe somebody's not as familiar talk a little bit about the benefits to hunting hogs on a property look at that but but you know what what is it about these things that people are are trying to eliminate you know I for for hunters and farmers alike look at that that's a monster man

Cable: we actually killed that one with with dogs and a knife that was up in oklahoma but they've just got as bad of a hog problem as we do in texas but yeah hogs are they're a real problem here whether you're a deer hunter or you're a landowner they cause problems for everybody

Cable: it's property damage right I mean a lot of people don't understand I mean they they will literally come in behind a farmer's day's work and eat every seed that he planted that day and you're like thinking all the fuel all the seed all the labor that went into that wiped out in one night

Brad: yeah I've even heard of them taking out barns like they'll root around the structure of the barn and the whole freaking thing will just fall over because they've made such a mess out of the foundation that

Cable: or like if you've got a water some kind of waterway they find a little leak in that and they start wallowing in it I mean they're bad for all of it

Brad: yeah man

Cable: they say we have two million hogs in texas that is like a 12 year old stat i'd say it's probably double that but the one interesting thing and I was talking to our texas parks wildlife feral hog program leader is that we have they think reached like carrying capacity to where I mean they're in every county but we've gotten to the point now where we kind of just can't support any more hogs we kill I think we kill 30 percent it's 20 to 30 percent we kill every year through you know hunting trapping aerial gunning all that stuff we're not legally allowed to poison them which I think is there's been a lot of testing for that I still think it's a good thing that we don't do that because they haven't figured out a way to keep that out of the food chain so until they do come out on the poisoning thing yeah

Brad: something else comes in and eats a poison hog it's going to impact them too so

Cable: the main thing is the feed how do they administer the hogs come in they knock the feet on the ground then the raccoon gets it or birds get it yeah or anything and then they die dead so yeah the

Brad: interesting I read coyote america a couple maybe last year and it was interesting they talked a lot about the poisoning of coyotes and if anybody's curious on that subject it was kind of an interesting look at it too so obviously we've established these things are a problem and and on whitetail Cable and I did a whitetail show for Gearbox Talk where we talk about a little bit about this but it can be detrimental to your whitetail setup you know you've got them running off deer from your feeder they can break feeders no good right if you have them in your area it's not good so Cable when you're trying to deal with hogs what's your ideal firearm set up what are you using to hunt these things

Cable: okay so my preferred time is done at night with the thermal and right now I'm running a pulsar thermian xp this is the best thermal that I've used and I've used a lot of them the thermion has a extensive color palette a lot of these thermals like they're not when you start messing around with the interface and the buttons and everything real pain in the ass to operate this one is the most user friendly that I have found it's got a external let me take it off the mount here but basically a button you push one time and then you just rotate up and down on that screen and very user friendly like I said thermal technology in just my limited 12 years or so that I've been in this industry has come a long way as far as the quality of the images more importantly though for the layman average guy like myself eight thousand dollars that's a lot of money so now you can get into a thermal optic for a nice one for 2500 bucks you can get into a night vision for you know seven eight hundred bucks so certainly it's still very expensive right but way more affordable than it used to be thermian has internal recording so all I need to do is turn it on and then just see it raise it up just to here that says record you hit that and you're rolling and then the cool thing is when this when these first came about you had a like a a disc like some kind of disc here that was recording your footage you had to run a wire to your scope yeah pain in the rear internal computer here stores all of your footage I mean hours and hours and hours

Brad: it's crazy how much that's changed so fast isn't it like

Cable: yeah you can go white hot black hot red hot whatever your your preference is I usually just like white hot yeah that's my traditionally my favorite and then I'm running it on and people are going to laugh here because I 'm always joking about the 6'5 creedmoor I found a use for the six side creedmore perfect hog gun these are 140 grain I believe they're hornady bullets and 6'5 creedmoor is actually 140 grain round is a good round for a hog I've shot so many hogs with the 223 and we were talking about this off the air two two three is great for the first shot when the hogs are all still and you can head shoot it after that you're putting pin holes in these things yeah they're going so fast usually you know between a 55 grain and 70 grain bullet it's just not doing the damage and the hogs might run off and die but you're never going to find them yeah so that's why I like a bigger bullets 6.5 creedmore there's there's plenty of ar platforms that offer the same kind of knockdown power obviously 308s and anything I just try to stay away from the 223s as a general rule so that's why I found the 6.5 to be effective for hogs and certainly coyotes this is basically what I used for predator hunting as well yeah I like to do like I said most of it at night the reason for that is dogs are more obviously more active at night like many other animals but you can get so much closer to them like most of the shots with this thermal inside 50 yards per shot hogs have terrible eyesight really at night time if you just play the wind you're going to get you can easily get within 50 yards probably closer if you really want to the thermal gives you that option I do use a I should have had it here with me but I use a this is a cool thing so this would get old trying to scan around all night I have a thermal monocular it's called a pulsar helium 2.0 also got internal recording handheld units that's a game changer and in texas a lot of people will if you if you have the access to hunt ag fields will drive dirt roads at night with the handheld to locate the hogs and this is what outfitters do too and god these landowners love the outfitters because they're hogs and they'll find a group of hogs and then park the truck and you know three guys will get out with ars and when people see these these videos or the stacks of like 30 feral hogs from a night that's what's going on it's multiple dudes with bigger caliber ars that are getting to within like three of them within 50 yards of a sounder and just unloading them yeah it's fun to do and then the one crappy thing about hogs from just a usage standpoint is that we're not allowed to donate them to like hunters for the hungry because of things like brucellosis strokinosis they do carry parasites they have to be cooked to you know medium medium well no pink in the middle on these things so sucks that we can't donate them yeah

Brad: I didn't know you couldn't donate them I thought that would be alive so the only way to do that is if you trap them okay you bring them in dead okay unlike a whitetail we could bring a white tail in all day okay so but yeah that's my setup I mean obviously 6'5 is going to drop the hammer on a coyote or bobcat as well I do have that predator call handy if you want to see what I use

Brad: yeah let's see it it's a fred eichler edition and it's distributed from western rivers it's really dirty but this is the I'll just show people the box too because maybe they're interested in that but there you go fred eichler series electronic predator call this is their highest in model I think it's about 350 bucks very loud you can flip the speakers to face whatever direction you want it's got a lot of pre fred's preloaded settings and he actually recorded a lot of these calls himself I don't know how many rabbits he tortured in the process but fred's a hell of a nice guy and I really am a big fan of that call specifically so yeah that's pretty much my my nighttime setup daytime setup

Brad: that was my next question I was gonna say what how do you shift during the day so

Cable: I either alternate between a 270 or 300 win mag like we were we were talked about in our other gearbox talk

for whitetail the the old 270 is the prototypical texas deer caliber that's a great flat shooting round it's going to really hit pay dirt especially inside 200 yards which is what all of our most of our whitetail shots are in texas vast majority so yeah I just use the 270 or whatever you know don't don't discriminate grab your deer deer rifle and go to town hogs will come in I mean we spent a lot of time at the at the dear lease recently and I mean I had a boar at 1 30 in the afternoon 95 degrees just coming out you wouldn't you wouldn't think I think that would be the case but I do look at the major feeding times and a lot of a lot of cases those turn out to be true so interesting but yeah

Brad: what about alright so for for like drawing them out let's talk about bait for a little bit I know you've you've kind of had your experience with a couple different ones what's your favorite when you do bait

Cable: favorite bait is just and what they're going to come to the most is just your regular old deer feeder so obviously corn there are other things though that I've used diesel fuel dig a hole put some corn in the hole and dump some diesel in there and big boars like that smell I don't know why yeah but I have someone told me that and I was like you're full of baloney it works it absolutely works a lot of times you could just mix up if you don't have a feeder that's fine you could just buy a bag of corn throw some some kool-aid in there and like get it fermenting the nastier it smells the better it's going to be for hogs but they like the sweet from the kool-aid you get it wet let it ferment and just kind of get nasty for a little bit put it out there they go to town on that as well

Brad: did not know that very interesting alright so these things can be dangerous and you know especially spot and stalk especially with an injured one what is your go-to sidearm for when you're hog hunting you know I  our buddy I think you you may or may not know joe another one of my buddies in texas joe bitar told me a story on one of my podcasts about a hog charging him yeah and you know these things are just much more aggressive than a lot of the other animals we pursue in north america so it's important to have some kind of sidearm I know you have something that you carry with you

Cable: so I'm a big fan of 1911's this is an sti spartan that was a I'm sorry it's a ranger I have a spartan as well a nine millimeter but yeah I think 45 with a 180 grain bullet is going to give you enough stopping power I also have a 10 mil if that's just a little overkill but this is 45 is my preferred sidearm and I always have it when I'm hog hunting here's an example two weeks ago I took my my twin girls they're five out to the to the lease and we were sitting in the blind lone boar boars like to travel alone a lot of the time comes in 30 minutes before sun goes down shot him with the 270 and he didn't drop right there he ran into a plum thicket very thick we got we got out and looked and I was like okay I see blood I sent the girls back to the blind because of how dangerous these things are and how thick that cover was if this thing charges at us there's no way I can protect them right so sent them back and I went in there after him with the 45 he ended up seeing me and before I get a shot and I ended up losing him but a lot of that was because I just didn't feel safe right and then five-year-olds and it's getting dark and anyway he jumped in the river and I never saw him again but he's dead somewhere but yeah that's that's generally when those those charges happen it's very rarely a healthy boar that hasn't been messed with is going to come after a person they don't want to it's like any animal they don't want to be around people when they're wounded though like this one had gone in that plum they get to bed down and die that's when they're extremely dangerous

Brad: yeah I think joe's story was they were feeding coming towards him and the wind was just right where they didn't smell him and at a certain point he realized they were gonna come right to him and I can't remember what's finally startled them and maybe it was him I can't remember if he even shot it with a pistol or maybe it's even his rifle I can't remember it's a great story on that one of the episodes I've done with him but it was the startling of the hog that it just blindly charged at noise basically and it was within 10 yards yeah

Cable: that's crazy yeah so but I mean dude I've been walking getting out of the deer blind and had a sounder coming at me in the wind being in my face and it it is kind of scary like yeah having that many and yeah it's a little unnerving yeah I mean in those situations I just try to make noise right there and but yeah like I've had this one lady I've visited with she got both of the insides of her thighs the hog ran through her legs it was wounded her son shot it big 250 pound board they shot it it went into thick cover and they went in there to try to find it and it ran literally right through her legs turning his head cut she had to get like 50 stitches on on the inside of each side

Brad: oh my gosh 

Cable: yeah so I've seen you know you can see you've seen what they do to dogs

Brad: yeah yeah vicious for sure alright so once you get one we kind of talked about cooking them obviously you gotta go a little bit longer what's your favorite way to cook a hog last question here

Cable: low and slow just going back to those parasites I don't want anything to do with those I mean stephen ranella talked about getting geonosis how awful that was eating undercooked bear meat same thing with a hog my favorite way is just get a back strap put it in the crock pot people say oh you're wasting a backstrap we shoot a lot of hogs we can afford to use backstrap for this and then just make like a a carne asada oh yeah dude yeah you know whatever your favorite taco seasoning is put that in there if you if you have any wild game broth you know throw that in there but the key is just like eight hours on low in the crock pot comes out you know it's just falling apart I started on on tortillas but it's just a little tex mex way to prepare it nice nice man that's basically it pretty easy

Brad: I'm an old man these days and I eat early and we're coming into dinner time now you got me all hungry here talking about making some tacos a little chips chip action

Cable: here's one thing I do want to say this boar testicles very very good underneath yeah if you've had rocky mountain oysters same deal yeah like you know I mean big old nasty boar you know what hot wheels deep fry them serving with some ranch pretty good

Brad: I'm proud to tell you I'm proud to tell you the first person on Gearbox Talk who's ever recommended boar testicles so yeah well I

Cable: gotta give a shout out to my buddy Greg Pavore he's a hog outfitter in seymour texas and he's the first one that turned me on to that and yeah pretty good

Brad: there you go alright we'll have to maybe try to find a testicle recipe to put in the show notes everything else that cable's talked about on the show is in the show notes we'll link out to all of his gear Cable man I appreciate you coming on it's been great and I again never been a hog hunter just by the fact that I'm in kentucky and we don't have them at least right here in kentucky so it's cool for me to get to learn a little bit and I'm sure the audience appreciated it thanks for coming on man

Cable: hey thanks for having me Brad

Brad: alright take care thank you Cable great show man I really enjoyed having you on I enjoy every time we get to do a podcast together whether it's you here or me on your show remember all the gear that Cable mentioned is linked to in the show notes now what's cool about this is if if you buy gear we make money and the reason you should care if we make money is because we're going to donate a portion of our proceeds to Raise Em Outdoors this is a camp that teaches kids and their parents to hunt fish camp shoot it's awesome what's better than that if you're really into these shows hit subscribe if you're not into this show but still watching please comment let me know why you'd watch a whole show you don't like that's weird alright that's it merry christmas happy holidays all that good stuff keep tagging me on GoWild keep commenting on here keep sending me messages I love to hear your feedback on the show we're applying that all the time it makes the show better it makes the show special for us to hear that people are really enjoying it and getting something out of it we really appreciate that my team loves the feedback and it keeps us motivated to keep cranking out this show every single week so thank you for that alright that's it for me today I got to go eat some ham see ya