Nice work. Are you processing the meat ?
I have processed some small ones in the past but did not process this one.
Feral hogs are a lot of work hand butchering for a small amount of meat in general, at least for the ones I did. About 3 years ago when I had a lot of hogs to deal with, I ended up using ..... a Sawz-all from DeWalt after gutting to pull the head/neck off and splitting both hams/shoulders leaving the thin back alone. After a while, I stopped doing that and they just became Coyote bait as I had more than enough in the freezer. Pork chops were also very cheap at the local grocery store.
Little piglets in a smoker are a different story if I tag some today. They are also easier to work with though, unfortunately are a bit hard to find where I live as I think they stay back in trees until adults.
I also used some 'donors' to practice salt curing meat. That was a fun exercise and made skinning out a sow worth the effort.
A front end loader on a tractor and a good knife with lots of practice make skinning out a feral hog a lot easier so, if you are new to it don't give up on the first few. I found the bristles were very hard on the knife I used initially and my cuts were not very good. With a little anatomy knowledge from earlier butchering 'attempts', things got better pretty quick until the point I opted for the Sawz-all for choice cuts
FAST butchering (though I was getting double digits a week and as many as 7 hogs in one night).
After using a 5.56 and a 6.8SPC, I must say I am a huge convert to 6.8SPC for feral hogs and coyotes. 6.8's will put them down when a 5.56 won't due to less than ideal shot placement.
Sometimes, my aim is not the best so I can use all the help the ammo company can provide at times.
The other word of
warning with night shooting and thermals. A lot of the more 'affordable' units don't have the best resolution and clarity of the image you are viewing. For me, deer are the worst or more specifically the fawns. Horses and cattle are easy to identify due to body shape, stature and, movement while grazing. If adult deer are grazing, looking at fawns in the grass is tricky. At ~100~200 yards, a fawn hiding in the grass is indistinguishable from a piglet that isn't moving. If you see a lot of deer and see the faint 'piglet' looking images, observe them closely! Last year I hit the Lotto Jackpot one night when I counted 27 adult deer in the thermal scope. That night the fawns really looked like a litter of piglets in the grass initially. It is easy to overlook the details and falsely identify a fawn if you don't have 3rd gen Night Vision to interrogate the thermal image. Behavior and body movement are important if all you have is a thermal image of average quality.
A final word of consideration. If like me, you shoot hogs all night on your property, your neighbors are not going to be happy if they are big city transplants for the weekend. Even if they aren't nervous hearing rifle fire during the day, random rifle fire all night can be upsetting. A
suppressor really helps alleviate complaints from neighbors.
