Barrs

Clayton,

We cut Barrs for two reasons. #1 and by far most important is Sausage!!! It has long been a tradition of our ancestors to cut hogs, turn them out for the year and then go collect your hogs for winter so the family can eat. Obviously times have changed but we still carry on this age-old custom. I don't know about y'all or anyone else but we don't eat boar hogs.you can take and cut a boar and within 2-3 months his boar taint is gone. Then for however much longer he lives he starts to marble and get fat within the meat. Which all equals some of the best table fare you could ever ask for!! The fried back straps are a pieces of heaven on Earth. #2 we do it for the trophy aspect. We trophy deer hunt in the winter, trophy hog hunt in the spring, & fish in the summer. It's adrenaline rush to continuously year after year catch huge teethed, 300+# hogs that you can then turn around and eat.

That being said we hunt totally different country. Where most of our barring takes place we pay for deer lease memberships or the people that own the property want their hogs "worked". So that takes alot of the angry owner/rancher/ farmer issues out of it. For the most part our country is endless miles of pine plantation, youpon thickets and oak flats. The damage from the hogs is minimal vs. y'all's country where most of the land is family owned, ranched or farmed.

Where my gripe on it is say you have a hunt that happened to them mike & big e last year where we bay 4 barrs, dogs get totally wrecked, punctured lungs, kills mikes Tweety dog and so on. But the dogs did work and sucked all 4 hogs up and got them in the trailer. There were 258, 264, 301, & 406# in the group, and plus its all on video. Now most hog hunters would give their left nut to be on a hunt like this. Then we show up for a tournament and the tournament won't take the hogs because "the majority" of the weekend warrior hog hunters now don't practice this old custom. It's not a big deal to y'all or other people because y'all don't ever do any of the extra work cutting hogs, therefor don't have them in your hunting areas. People that think its no big deal to rule them out for the most part don't ever catch Barrs. Therefore feel slighted when other people bring them in by the trailer full.

Didn't y'all have a Barr in y'all's stringer last year that won TDHA??

In the 10+ tournaments we've been involved in we've only ever caught Barrs once and actually got 2nd that time lol so it's not really a huge deal to us. We would rather keep them to eat anyway