Hogzilla

Well I don't post a lot of pictures of what we catch, we all know what dead hogs look like but figured this one was to good not to share. We hunted all night Friday night checking corn fields that Billy had just planted for silage and making our rounds on neighboring properties checking pastures, silage pits and feed wagons and ended up catching 3, well we decided to give it a go again on Saturday night being as we had a good night before especially for the pups, turkey season is in full swing here in MS and that cuts a lot of ground out so we stayed close to the house, after making our rounds and checking out the usual crossings looking for track to cut and a less than stellar performance on the dogs end early in the night, after a run in with a skunk by one young dog and my Kate gyp going down a dillo hole we decide to load up and go to the house and make one last shot at it, we ride the edges of the field and find some tracks leaving out from where they were feeding behind the cows at around 2 am, I see some HUGE tracks going out of the pasture and Billy comes to check them out and we just agree that it looks like some calves had gone under the fence, we send my Ben dog and his Sophie gyp under the fence in the smaller tracks, with in 10-15 minutes they are locked down bayed less than 30 yds from the truck, we send 3 younger dogs to them and let them bay for about 20 minutes before we get the catch dog out and ease up to the fence, we could see it was a decent hog and sent the catch dog, when he gets in there and hits we see the hog charge him and it was at that moment we realized we had our hands full and had way more pork on our hands than we could handle, a massive Barr came up out a stump hole and wasn't even phased by a 50lb bulldog hanging off him, they worked their way into a thick briar patch and the hog was charging us every time we got close enough to try and leg him, he was mopping the forest floor with that bulldog and in less than a minute had cleared out an area about 30'x30' and was charging the other dogs, it was then I realized we weren't going to be able to leg this beast and get him on the ground, and if we attempted it it was certain one of us was going to get hurt and we were going to get a great catch dog killed, we didn't have a rope on us long enough to rope him with so I told Billy to go get his .357 revolver out of the truck, luckily it wasn't but about 40 yds from us, while he was gone to get the pistol I had a long stick I was trying to jab the hog with every time he would start grinding the catch dog in the ground, I was scared to death that he was going to bust him up and crush him, I've seen the damages a brute can do to a dog and never bust the skin, in the meantime 5 bay dogs were working and fighting this hog when they had the chance, about that time I hear limbs breaking coming at me and it's a second Barr hog and he's running the bay dogs down just beating the wine out of them, he ran up behind my Ben dog and flung him about 7 foot in the air, he starts grabbing and biting onto the bulldog that's caught on the other hog, I cracked a limb over his head and he turns at me, I grab a limb to pull myself up a tree and the dang thing breaks, so I'm running to the fence as Billy's coming back in with the gun, by this time the hog with the bulldog still caught had gotten into another bad briar patch and we couldn't see a thing, the other Barr charged us trying to get in there and we couldn't shoot because we had bay dogs all amongst him, I finally run toward him and throw my light in his direction, he takes to and charges my light and gives Billy a chance to run up and put a round in his head, he takes the shot like its a shot of whiskey and runs off, we finally get in there where Red is caught and the hog is half way wore out, I yell at Billy to get ready and I grab him by the tail, as he turns to charge me Billy sinks a round literally at point blank in the side of his head, I scoop up the bulldog and break for the truck to assess the damage, all the dogs come out to me and get in the pond, Red is not as bad as I though he was just beat down and Ben has a good cut in his stomach and bails up in back of the truck and lays down, we check everybody and go back in to find the second hog, after a few minutes everything is gone out and I look at the garmin and they've all gone .5 and are bayed again, we slip in there and are able to yell the dogs back enough for Billy to get a shot in him, these hogs had just made a liar out of us in a few ways, we were just talking a few hours earlier about how there aren't many big hogs left around us because of the night vision hunters, we also were talking last week about all the blooded hogs we had get out of the pen about 6 years ago, we caught these two 4-5 years ago and cut them and put them in the pen and they tore out and haven't been seen since, they were 3/4 wild and 1/4 blooded that had been on the loose all this time, and to top it off we were talking about how thick it is around here and the probability of getting to shoot a hog bayed is slim to none and we had just done it twice in one night, it amazes me how an animal can be so big but yet so elusive and never seen or caught on camera, the creek bottom these hogs lives in is filled with beaver ponds and spring heads and the hog pen with the feeder hogs washes down into it and it's on the backside of a lot Billy feeds out his yearlings in, these guys have a honey hole of a thousand acres all they can ever imagine to eat so where they are completely protected and not messed with, we try to avoid going In there because of how wet and nasty it is and infested with cotton mouths, I was plum tickled at my Kate gyp, she's off my running walker butter bean and Cajuns late Jack dog and had never seen a hog before in her life and Friday night literally took right to it like a duck to water getting in there and running and pulling the lead a few times and then baying down, especially at night, she was raised running loose here at my place and will smoke a red fox or coyote and looks to have a great nose on her, after catching the first hog in front of her Friday night she started rigging out of the box, all she needs now is to be trash broke because I now know she will run whatever she can smell,and fed tracks and she's got the potential to be a really nice dog, it was a great night with my best friend using dogs that me and him have bred and raised ourselves and that's a reward in itself, and catching the two biggest hogs either of us had ever caught, we didn't get a weight in them because the big listed hog broke the hook on a set of 500lb scales and we hadn't planned on killing anything that big and was more worried about getting the meat hung in the cooler, I know he was over 500 and that's the first time I've ever broke the 500lb club, these two hogs are about to provide a lot of meals for several families, we were able to stretch out a hundred foot of rope out to the tractor and kept dragging them out and repositioning the rope and used a come along on the second hog to get him close enough to get the rope to the tractor, after we went and got Billy's nephew, who was supposed to went with us , out of the bed at 330 this morning to help us drag hogs out...

Wish u would've gotten a picture, they had Billy's truck bed squatted to the point the fender wells were almost running the tires on the back...

Filled up the walk in cooler...