I'm from Arizona and a friend of mine here told me that they had relatives in Oklahoma that occasionally have problems with feral hogs on their property. I was planning a trip to Arkansas to look at hunting properties to buy. So I arranged to meet their relatives on my way to Arkansas.

I stopped by their 500 acre ranch in Oklahoma to meet them and see what I was getting into. They had some feral hogs there recently, but the hogs appeared to have left the ranch when I arrived. They had a couple of hog traps. I got some corn for bait and asked if they could put some bait out by the traps and I would return in a week to try and get some.

I left the ranch and went to Arkansas.

I returned to Oklahoma a week later and no hogs had showed up. So the next day I start driving back to Arizona. I drive for 10 hours, almost make it to NM, and spend the night at a rest area on the interstate in my travel trailer. In the morning, I get sent this picture of 7 hogs caught in 1 trap. NOOOOOO! As soon as I leave, the hogs come back. First thoughts were its too far to turn around. A couple cups of coffee later and I was on my way back to Oklahoma. I made a 20 hour U-turn to get these hogs!







Harvested the meat, put it on ice, and made sausage the next day. I did not use the meat from the adult boar, their meat is too strong, and that guy went to the scavengers. My travel trailer is set up to double as a mobile meat processing facility. A board is placed over the motorcycle carrier. The external shower on the back provides hot and cold running water.









I spent a week there trying to hunt hogs at night by calling them in with a Foxpro using juvenile hog in distress sounds. No luck. Was only able to get hogs that were caught in a trap.

Ended up with 15 chub bags full of sausage. Gave some away to the landowner as a thanks for letting me hunt hogs there and also gave some to the folks in Arizona for putting me in touch with their relatives in Oklahoma.

This bald eagle showed up to eat the carrion dumped in the clearing.

All's well that ends well. I like your setup for processing game, right down to the compact paper towel rack.

Regards,
hm

I'm guessing if you were going from Arkansas to Az, you were travelling I-40. Which means you passed about 30 miles north of me when you went through Shamrock, TX. It also means you passed within about 2 miles of my sons new pivot where I imagine next week I will be killing pigs when he plants peanuts on it. You passed through a lot of good pig country western OK/eastern TX Panhandle.

Glad you got you some pigs, and got you some sausage made. I bet it will be good. That boar wasn't what I would call too big to process, though boars vary in their nastiness from pig to pig. Lots of times though you can soak the meat in ice water in your cooler for a couple days, changing the ice/water a couple times and they are plenty good after that. IDK if you have tried that before or not.

I like the travelling camper/butchering setup.

JPTinTX...You are correct. I took I-40 and I actually drove past Shamrock, TX 4 times.

Thanks for the pointer on salvaging meat from the boars. I always chill game meat with ice as soon as I can after the animal is killed and pull the drain plug so the meat does not get water logged. Soaking the boar meat in ice water and flushing the water a couple times to tone down the strong taste makes sense. I'll will try that in the future...THANKS!

Here is the chest freezer setup to keep bags of ice frozen in camp and game meat frozen while traveling for days between states.

The travel trailer came from the factory with 120 watts of solar panels on the roof and a solar charge controller for the trailer batteries. More solar power would be helpful, but this works OK as a minimum for my needs. The chest freezer motor uses 1 amp. Connected a 2000 watt inverter to the trailer batteries to provide 120 volt AC to power a small chest freezer. This minimizes the need to run a generator full time.

Nice set up, great post and pics.

You have it all figured out. Fine way to spend some time.