Hogtown Homiles

What with health adventures and crashing pc's and storms knocking out the cable connection, I've been rather remiss in chronicling the goings-on of the Hogtown Irregulars as of late, so here goes a tidbitish tale or two.

The annual gator cull went smashingly well for the lucky ones with tags, but those not needing any stinking badges done good too. Seems that over 4000 lottery winners took home a gator, and since thats almost a third of what the unofficial cull amounted to, all in all a satisfactory winnowing.

The ranks of HIM (Hogtown Irregular Members) swelled to over 40 by late August but since virtually all of the newly arrived wannabes were children...average age 22-26...they haven't stopped by lately and Ert believes the drop off to be at least in part due to the rather rugged nature of our soirée's, and the lack of anything resembling creature comforts at HC (Hogtown Central). The organization does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, creed, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nor gender, but wusses are banned from the get-go and that's that. As one of the older members, to be honest in my opinion it wouldn't hurt to have a comfy chair or two but that'd mean keeping things tidy to at least some degree, and there isn't a Slaughter brother alive who doesn't stop by at HC to get AWAY from doily-doings at home so this is a touchy subject.

As usual, the dead hogs keep piling up almost to the point we've stopped hunting them...only so much barbecued wild pig one can eat day in, day out...and ever since the city tore down the old homeless tent city there simply aren't enough folks to toss a few hundred pounds of meat to on a regular basis and what we DON'T want is to kill for the sake of killing without harvesting the bounty. Even ONE carcass can attract far too many freeloading gators, and killing them is still a touchy subject with law enforcement.

We all continue to experiment with various types of longarm, sidearm, and shotgun ammo. Having hogs to shoot seems to generate more real-world results, but far be it from me to diss, oh, say the Box O' Truth proprietor and his attacks upon deadly water jugs. Ballistic gelatin is a simulacrum of pig muscle which is a simulacrum of human flesh, and water is a simulacrum of, well, water. At the end of the day I'd hesitate to compare bullet penetration in a wild hog to anything human but the old stand-by cartridges continue to impress. Both Federal HST and Ranger-T chew up too much of the meat in smaller hogs but it wouldn't be too much of a wild-ass guesstimate to infer that something similar might occur in two-legged pigs. Now that PMC Starfire ammo is becoming available once more I want to try some .357's and S&W 40 loads on our porcine targets and will get back to you if and when something dramatic happens.

3" 12 gauge Remington Buckhammers simply drop a 300-pounder in his tracks, case closed, and the Brennecke KO's aren't far behind in stopping power. I will not shoot anything bigger than a coon with a 5.56 or .223, but some of our less humane members have and the results aren't pretty. 7.62X39 FMJ's are marginally better but my favorite hog-rifle-round remains the 150 grain Winchester .308 Supreme Elite XP3. Lots of others have different preferences but for my money nothing has better bang for the buck; accurate and packs a helluva wallop on smallish game, or anything not-so dangerous and under 500 pounds, say. Sure, you could take a grizz with one but I would not. Elk and/or moose, maybe, and black bears for sure, but the great bears are in a class all by their lonesome.

Same with gators. Any decent 12 gauge slug will do if you know where to hit the creature, and depending upon the size of the lizard, a .308 wouldn't be over-kill by any means.

Some of the guys are making noise about hunting pig with knifes and spears.

I wish them well.

If I remember anything else, I'll tack it on, but for now that's all folks.