Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
|
#1
|
|||
|
|||
Wild Hogs Becoming A Big Problem To Farmers And Gardeners..........
When they harvested the hogs on
this show, *they had the meat processed and donated it to a homeless shelter as not to waste it. Lets hear your wild hog experiences! Rich from PA To me it does taste different. but it has to be a variable...diet & mast, harvest size, harvesting methods/butchering.... a very different lean but most supermarket cuts these days are way too lean for my tastes. Chops and loin cuts are almost devoid of taste. Reason most are brined and undercooked from old day recommendations. Only one place in town where I can get a slab of belly these days, all the rest is salt pork or similar size at the Asian markets, hocks up here are all smoked, even ground pork is 3$ or more a lb . So shoulders are meat of choice for me, esp. for making sausage and most all my Mexican dishes. Chefs are buying up the piglets of more exotic breeds and sending to finishers. some of this is is similar taste if finished on acorn or other nut mast. But wild boar is also on their menu these days. Wild boar tastes pretty good but should be w/o saying... if properly prepared, don't know about pork belly/loin meat from them. Had a shoulder up here that was as good as any Boston Butt, was a bit leaner, yet slow cooked in a Ragu it was very enjoyable. Conversely had a chop in GA. grilled that was as tough as leather, (drunken soldier BBQ from hitting one w/ a car). Wild boar is a delicacy in EU,had it in FRG and Italy, excellent dishes. Catching on in the US and certainly the taste is not like the commercial ultra lean bred pig common today. Chef Eric Rupert recently had a PBS show on Tuscan Boar hunting. Similar to US. Drive hunting w/ dogs and shotguns. Feral hogs are an invasive alien of no use in American eco system. Herd animals, mostly. They cause wide spread destruction of agriculture every where it lives. Introduced thru the South and later thru SW by the Spanish in the 1500s, English in the 1600s colonies, followed Settlers west, wide spread problem in US now days. Hogs eat just about anything and all night long ( as that Canadian Murderer Pickton knows all too well) . Russian Boar was also introduced for sport, not as big as feral ( ~400ish lbs) but huge examples of x breeding are showing up. Google image for Hogzillia. As hogs generations go more feral and X, they get the tusks and hair and mean... really, really mean. Javelina are in the SW are actually peccary( related) but can cause similar results if near aggie fileds, yet these are native and deserve a different approach. especially to keep them from disease introduction. don't know if Javelina able to x-breed with pig. These are edible but do not taste so good, esp. if butchered poorly or if you get musk on the meat. Back to hogs, potential source of many diseases, accounts for just about all (very few) trichinosis incidents in the US every year. Believe one was sourced as a bear. Recently feral hogs were suspected as the source of spinach contamination in CA. Big worry there may be more of this to come. Less hunting pressures and hunting bans have increased the size of the herds, thus territory expansion and crop destruction and as you said even moving into towns to feed (same problem up here with Turkey, Cougar and Bear, Coyote in LA) . Prolific breeders. Tough to hunt because they can get under and through the thick underbrush quickly, fences don't usually stop em. As you said really need dogs or a chance encounter. Bad eyesight, excellent hearing and like turkey, rarely r u you are going to walk em up. Blinds or dogs. Small problem in WA State: http://tribune-democrat.com/outdoors...pig-population but understand they are a problem in PA also http://tribune-democrat.com/outdoors...pig-population Yea, this is really a gray area for a gardening unless they are in yours. |
#2
|
|||
|
|||
Wild Hogs Becoming A Big Problem To Farmers And Gardeners.(Gunner)
Hi Gunner Thank you for the very informative post. I didn't even realize that we had wild hogs in certain PA counties. I'm in central PA and hunted all my life and never saw a hog in our area. We are getting more and more coyotes around here and I feel it's only a matter of time until the hog population will invade us also. Perhaps instead of growing tomatoes in my garden, I should be breeding hog dogs I would imagine a good dog brings a hefty price. Rich |
Reply |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Forum | |||
Any tropcal or temperate farmers or hobby farmers here? | Australia | |||
Hunter Organic Growers Society (HOGS) July meeting | Australia | |||
"Vanishing Bees" a problem for gardeners and farmers. | Gardening | |||
How to drive ground hogs out of the backyard? | Lawns | |||
Speaking of Hogs, when did you see your last hedgehog? | United Kingdom |