10 Best Thermal Imaging Monocular For Hunting

Best Thermal Imaging Monocular For Hunting in 2023

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Hog Hunting

A first-timer's experience hog hunting in the Florida woodlands.

The alarm clock rang with a beep-beep-beep, and I shut it off. With just enough energy, we woke up and rolled out of bed. 5am usually isn't that early, but it was early for a Saturday morning after a full week of work and school. We grabbed some water bottles, slid on our heavy boots, and got into the car. Nick called Andrew to wake him up (Andrew is not good with alarm clocks). We drove the 3 short blocks and picked up Andrew. He carried with him a blanket; he wanted to sleep on the drive up.

The drive took a little over an hour. We were planning to meet David and a few of his buddies at a gas station on the North side of the Lake-Sumter campus. It was still dark outside, and I watched the lights flying by. Nick and I talked about what we expected from the day. This was the first time any of us were going hog hunting, and David had tried the days before to answer all of our questions. I still didn't really have a good idea what a wild hog actually looked like, but I imagined that it had to be strong and tough. David and his friends were also bringing their hunting dogs with them: specially trained to find and take down the prey.

We found the gas station on a sparse road. It was the only set of lights for at least a couple of miles. Andrew woke up when we pulled up, and we went inside the gas station to get some juice and breakfast. There wasn't much of a selection, so we went outside to wait for David and the others. We only waited for a little while when a truck with a dog cage in the bed pulled up along side of the building. We walked over and introduced ourselves.

"Good mornin'," they said as we walked up.

"Good morning. Those are some nice looking dogs... Are you the guys that David and us are meeting?"

They had a large cage in the bed that had five dogs inside. I walked up to the dogs, and they said they were friendly. They were crying like they wanted out, so I reached my hand up and petted one. David's friends went inside the store for drinks. Another truck pulled up behind us.

The man got out and approached us. He said, "Are these your dogs?" Nick shook his hand and introduced himself. We thought this was David's other friend, so Andrew introduced himself also. I stuck my hand out and said, "Hello, I'm Amber." He turned his back to me and didn't even acknowledge that I had spoken. Nick looked over at me and shrugged. I thought maybe he didn't hear me, but inside I was upset because I knew it was because I was a woman. He talked for a minute about the different types of dogs- he liked the bulldog mixes because he thought they were smarter. The man walked inside, and David's friends came back out. Turns out that this man was not the one we were waiting for, but had seen David's friends and their dogs a few times before at this same gas station.

David pulled up in his truck shortly after. He had four more dogs in the bed of his truck. We all said hello, and I was relieved to find that David was much nicer than the man who had ignored me minutes before. David roughly explained where we were driving to and just to follow him. Nick, Andrew, and I hopped back into our car and followed the two trucks down the back roads. David has access to many state and private properties where he hunts the nuisance animal. The caravan of vehicles traveled over back roads until we turned of onto a small, un-maintained clay road. David stopped to unlock a fence, where he also let the dogs out of their cages. We continued down the road with the dogs running along our vehicles. The brush got thicker, and we stopped to get out.

David handed each of us short pieces of rope. He explained that it was to tie the hogs' legs with if we had an opportunity. He gave a couple commands to the dogs, and they ran up ahead darting in and out of the woods. They were looking for a scent. I learned that there were two main types of dogs when you are hunting for hogs: bay dogs and catch dogs. Bay dogs pick up the scent and are usually some kind of hound mix- a breed with a good nose. Catch dogs fight the hog to wear it out until the hunter can get to it, and are your only defense to keep the hogs from attacking. Catch dogs also wear a large, leather collar to protect their necks from the tusks that many hogs thrash around when being hunted down.

We walked together further into the woods and scrub following the dogs as they looked for the scent. They didn't seem to be picking up on anything. David talked to us about how smart hogs can be, and he told us about a huge hog he had seen just the week before in the same patch of woods. This large hog had totally destroyed a feeder David had built out of a metal drum sunk into the ground with concrete. The hog had to be at least a few hundred pounds to destroy something so well constructed. The thought of taking down such a massive hog was exciting, but also a little scary.

Suddenly, our ears all perked up to the baying of David's lead dog. As we started in the direction of the call, David said, "She wouldn't be hollerin' if there wasn't nothin' there." The six of us took off tearing through the brush: pushing through palms and jumping falling branches. It was an extreme adrenaline rush. This could be our hog.

The other dogs darted around us looking for the same trail the other dog had found. We halted in a clearing to listen again for the bay dog's call, but we heard something running through the brush towards us. I could see the movement through the scrub, and I knew whatever it was, it was coming right for me! I thought, this is something big coming at me, and I'm going to have to catch it, and then I remembered those tusks David talked about earlier.

Out of the brush jumped out our lead bay dog. She had lost her scent trail. We searched around the area and found where the hogs had been uprooting to get food. It was fresh, and they had been there today, David told us. The day was starting to warm up, and we choose to keep hunting by the nearby water. But the dogs did not pick up any more scent trails in the woods, or near the water. We headed back to our vehicles and called the dogs back.

"There must've been a whole group of em', cuz she wouldn't have bayed unless she saw them. They must've ran all around and mixed up the scent. She's a good dog. They're out there." David was confident about his dogs.

We said good-bye to the other guys, and followed David and his dogs back to his house. We met his wife, his two kids, and his other dogs. David's best catch dog (that didn't go with us) had been cut open the week before on another hog hunting trip. There was a large open gash on the chest, and several smaller scratches on his legs and muzzle. The dog had gotten stitches from the vet, but they had been pulled out.

David gave us a baby hog in a green cooler that Nick put in the trunk. I was disappointed that we had not caught anything that morning, but at least we came home with something. David's wife brought out three different albums full of pictures of hogs they had both caught. They go out many times every week for hunting, and each time bring their meal home for slaughtering.

Nick, Andrew, and I got in the car and waved good-bye. We stopped by a Hardee's for a fast meal because we wanted to get home and get cleaned up. On the way, we talked about how much fun we had and about how we all wanted to go hog hunting again soon. We were all tired from being up early and expending our energy running through the woods, but we knew that we'd be back in the woods again after the fun we'd had that day.