Hunting wild boar

Ileso, I like your train of thought here "some are in it for the shooting and some for the hunting" "the shooting" to me implies a target which a pen for boar will provide in abundance, and as you say "personally I think it is unfair on the animals" ----- I whole heartedly agree ! Its not for me. So back to the posters comment is it ethical or does it just come down to shooting morals----- well I am sure you will all have your own ideas on this ,although judging by the views versus number of replies this is not something that people want to comment on or maybe its not that important to anyone?
For me taking a Wild beast ,feather ,fin or fur ticks all the right boxes . Field craft and knowledge and experience make the end game far more of an accomplishment .
 
Quite right- what's the OP's view based on his experience?! I wonder why he asked the question........
 
Quite right- what's the OP's view based on his experience?! I wonder why he asked the question........

Does it really matter ? If that's all he's got, it's pretty much irrelevant, and regardless, there will always be people who don't agree with what we choose to do, and we should be happy to justify it if asked ?

Apart from that, it's quite interesting to hear other peoples views ?
 
to get others views on things is always interesting.
theres quite a lot of reasons why people will go to fenced drives , they may be older, or they may not have an abundance of wild boar where they live and have no other option. modern humans are just lazy, who knows, and really, who cares.

but the original question was an interesting one. because it wasnt really about the ethics of the situation but whether it could be called actual hunting.
i would consider it more of a shooting/training excercise, but hey, thats just me. I am lucky i can walk out the door on any given day and find boar tracks within a 500m radius of my home. not everyone has that.

Its a bit like a pheasant shoot., its not a pheasant hunt, its a shoot. a drive isnt hunt either, its a drive... same thing. they shoot their animal and get their trophy.
hunting boar is way more dangerous, way dirtier. you need a bit of a crazy mindset to go for that sort of thing. you raise your dogs and love them and then have them gored, you carry them to the vet with their intestines falling out... its quite a raw ordeal. you find your pigs, you either shoot them or stick them with a knife. then there are the weeks you dont get your animal, but you insist, you track them dozens of kilometres on foot, through forest, through scrub, through the mud, through the rain to find they crossed a flooded river... its not as pretty as in an asterix comic book. it really is hard work.

anyway, I think we get enough flak from antis and others that dont understand hunting to now have to start justifying ourselves to one another. there are more unethical things going on like poaching and habitat destruction.
 
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hunting boar is way more dangerous, way dirtier. you need a bit of a crazy mindset to go for that sort of thing. you raise your dogs and love them and then have them gored, you carry them to the vet with their intestines falling out... its quite a raw ordeal. you find your pigs, you either shoot them or stick them with a knife. then there are the weeks you dont get your animal, but you insist, you track them dozens of kilometres on foot, through forest, through scrub, through the mud, through the rain to find they crossed a flooded river... its not as pretty as in an asterix comic book. it really is hard work..

There is no way to drive boar where I hunt them: in the mountains, in woods and fields of farms, in huge swamps with dry forests or water, or marsh or streams. Sometimes I am alone, sometimes with one partner, sometimes two or three of us and dogs in different roles.

When you hunt with your dogs, do they pick up a particular boar and trail it, or just the freshest trail to perhaps a herd of pigs, and then single out and follow one of them until cornering it? We have had things work out all those ways. Some dogs seem to know what their master wants.
 
I live in the mountains, with dense woods and rivers, very steep and very rocky. Its not perfect, but you can drive boar on almost any terrain except marsh/swamps I think. the key is to have a very good understanding of your terrain and your quarry. in most terrain boar will follow set paths based on geography, they will also set up tent in specific areas depending on the weather. The weather is the key to predicting where the will be in a given area. rain, snow, wind, sun etc will have a direct impact on the pigs position on any given block of land. when it rains they seek cover, dense vegetation, if its hot they are near water under cover, if it is cold and windy but sunny, they will be high up in any small patch of warmth away from the wind... and so on... after a few years we no longer think about it, but it pays to pay attention to these details in the beginning. these changes could also be influenced by food sources so it pays to also notice what they are eating.

to make a drive work, even a mini drive of 4-5 guys + a pack of dogs, you need to track them to their rough location, then check they are within the given area buy checking the escape routes for tracks, then you set out the guns to the best escape routes and once in position put the dogs on the trail driving the boar to the guns. we do that with foxes too. we only loose the hounds when everyone is in ready.

more specifically when we go out we split up in the morning. 3-4 cars looking for the freshest tracks. then we debate the best option based on what we saw and where they were heading, a herd, a single large male, we try to avoid those with small piglets etc... its not possible to single out an animal from the sounder with our local boar, they are wild as f#@k. sometimes they split up, other times they run together. large males are not usually within a sounder but usually are a bit off from the rest or alone with a younger male (which they send/push out as scouts/cannon fodder when in trouble and haul ass in the opposite direction), females with a litter will protect the litter by trying to divert the dogs away from the babies, we avoid these because they will get shot and the litter will die.

then we track the chosen boar trying to figure out where they are, again this is based on weather for the most part and knowledge of geography. from there what we do is also based on how many we are and what dogs we have with us, the hounds are good at tracking and driving them forward, but we also have 3 or 4 large mountain dogs (cao de castro laboreiro, cao da serra da estrela, husky) that will also catch and hold anything but the meanest male.. because we have a legal maximum of 5 hunters/group its not easy to cover the escape routes so those going in with the dogs also carry shotguns because the larger pigs dont usually want to move and will tear up the dogs.

plan it like a military ambush. find them, make a plan, try to make the plan work... its very gratifying when it works. minimum noise is essential.
it beats paintball by a long shot.

just so you have an idea,the first pig i tracked this year i was alone with my beagle, i was after foxes, but because i found the tracks i decided to find out where he was, single medium pig. we tracked him for about an hour, at times visual tracks but mostly just my beagle on the scent(on a leash). we ended up at a small patch of dense shrubs of no more than 100m2 in a sunny patch out of the wind on a small hill, it was very cold and windy that day. the tracks went in but never came out. we circled the patch twice to make sure he was in there. no tracks came out so i sent in the beagle just for the fun of it because i didnt have any slugs with me and it was impossible to get back up. and anyway once the dog started barking at him he headed off the other way as he had scented/heard me anyway. but if there were two more guys with me we would have had him easy. and we wasnt very big or my dog wouldnt have moved him either.

I have tried stalking them but the vegetation the boar hide in is too difficult.
 
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ileso,
Thanks for taking time to post such details of your hunting terrain and methods.

You are quite right about the mountains, especially steep ones, in that almost all game has to keep to some sort of trail; they cannot just run anywhere. In the winter, I often see wild pigs walking ridges, where they can see lot and have wind currents bringing alerts to them.

Now days, I am seldom able to get more than one hunting companion. And we cannot choose to hunt based on the weather, but have to learn how the weather affects game in an area, and deal with that on the days available to us. But that is the challenge, and the kind of hunting I love.
 
pity you cant get another gun or two to join you.
but yes, you have to be a bit on the crazy side and love it for this sort of thing. Its a lot simpler to go on a drive where all the work has been done by the organisers. Not quite hunting, but still lots of fun because I usually go with a bunch of friends to enjoy the outing.
 
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