Well, it looks like we will be road tripping down to the Table Rock Lake area of MO next weekend. We will be there on February 6-9. Anyone know where a fella might whack a hog in that area?

I grew up on table rock, and trapped feral hogs for a job for a few years in MO. It is illegal to hunt them on any public land( Mark Twain national forest, state ground”conservation areas”, and Corp of engineers land around lake) There aren’t a ton of pigs in Taney, Stone, or Barry Counties to begin with but by the time you take away all the public land the odds of finding a private landowner with pigs that will allow a stranger on their property to hunt them is pretty low. Additionally, odds of successfully finding fresh pig sign and hunting them down in the daytime in the Ozark habitat is pretty tough. Sorry to be a buzzkill haha.

Armadillos are the new MO hogs, your welcome.

Yup, Conservation Commission made it illegal to hunt them. Odd that just a few years ago they said to shoot them on sight when hunting other species.

BUUUUT,,,,,,,,if you want to see hogs, go to the Piney Wilderness Area in the back of Piney Cove on Table Rock Lake. That's where there at in Stone and Barry Co. Hogs are causing trouble in Taney Co. Missouri but I'm not familiar with that area. Put Piney Wilderness Area in your search engine and it'll pop right up.

Haha everyone in SW MO must know about those pigs in Piney, I think they have been knocked back pretty good in there besides a few lone boars, but could be wrong. The trapper that covers that area thinks he is a pretty big deal ha

I hope they kill ever one of em' in Piney. That high ridge on the south side of Piney Cove use to be one of my favorite deer huntin spots. I saw some folks pull a big boar hog out of there in the late 90s while deer hunting. And there I was with a .45 flintlock. Simon Kenton could load on the run but not me.

I never read anything I can remember about Kenton loading on the run, but can't say he couldn't. However, it was Lewis Wetzel who was known for it.

I"m trying to remember why MDC shut down hunting hogs? It wasn't cause they wanted more of them.

Hay day the explanation I was givin was that trapping the hogs was a better approach than hunting them. Could take bigger numbers at one time with out scattering them about. But who knows if that’s true

It may have also been to eliminate any incentive to turn a bunch of hogs loose to have something to shoot. Didn't want to create an industry that depended on a nuisance to support it?

Some states, Tn and Mo included, recognized that allowing hunters to shoot hogs only promoted hog hunting. We all know that making a species attractive to hunters promotes and ensures it survival, contrary to the desired result in this case. It doesn't help that some unethical individuals would intentionally spread wild hogs to create hunting opportunities. Ky arrested a number of people for this wildlife violation when I lived there. So these states tried something different. They made it illegal to shoot hogs while hunting and provided assistance to landowners to trap and kill wild hogs on their property. I don't know if this has been successful or not, but it makes sense to me to try something different when what you were doing wasn't working.

Two semi-related but funny stories. Back in the 80's or early 90's, hog prices went to almost nothing. If you had hogs, you were losing your behind on them. More than a few guys running 200 sows in a farrow to finish operation went bankrupt. Changed the structure of the whole industry.

But if you have a bunch of sows in the barn, you can't just turn them off......so some pigs were in the pipeline. So rather fan lose about $150 each on a bunch of feeder pigs, one guy (makes for a good story...and might even be true)....took a trailer load of hogs to the middle of the town square, opened the gate and cut em loose. His reasoning was.....town folks been dumping dogs and cats on us for years, time for some payback.

Second story was a guy figured out he could charge more for guys to come to his place and shoot a fat hog walking around in a 40 acre pasture than he could get selling it at market. An extension of that story would be guys just turned domestic hogs loose, that then became feral....and thrived. Seems to me the timeline of the feral hogs showing up corresponds to that dip in hog prices, as I don't recall feral hogs being much of an historic problem in the Ozarks until recently.