A Chef’s Perspective on Feral Hogs
Published#0052
I am happy to introduce Jesse Griffiths, author of The Hog Book, A Chef’s Guide to Hunting, Butchering and Cooking Wild Hogs.
This is a “coffee table” book of 400 pages. The photos are great, the recipes all look good, and the advice on dealing with feral hogs is excellent.
For anyone serious about cooking and eating feral hog, this is your book.
His advice on hog hunting is spot on.
I’ll direct your attention to the final page in the book, quoted here in full:
I love wild hogs. I know they’re a nuisance to many and a financial scourge to some. The economic damage they have wrought on farmers and ranchers in my home state is unimaginable and incalculable. I even know people who shoot them in the stomach so they’ll run off and die in the brush without needing to be dragged off to the gut pile. I understand the long-play sentiment, but putting the onus on a living thing to conveniently die is absurd. There’s no call for being mad at the hogs.
This sort of thing doesn’t happen because they’re merely an inconvenience; they’re downright dangerous and the destruction is very real. I realize that we can’t eat every single one of them, but the quixotic utopian in me actually does want that. I want to try. I want to feed the poor with them and have them replace the turkey at Thanksgiving.
Hogs aren’t going anywhere (they’re going everywhere), so let’s eat some of them. This book is meant to empower new hunters to fearlessly eat hogs, which can provide the table with a lot of really good meat, with zero inputs-no feed, no veterinary bills, no fences, nothing. Every pound of feral hog eaten is one less pound of meat that has to be raised on a feedlot, packaged in plastic and distributed across the country. When you eat a hog, you’re helping vegetarians have greater, unfettered access to vegetables by thinning out the surfeit of hogs eating their food. Controlling wild pigs is a multi-tiered win benefiting landowners (public and private), farmers, hunters and the people that hunters feed.
These animals are prescient, intelligent, stubborn survivors and deserve our respect. We brought them here, so we have inherited the incumbent responsibility to control them.
Go forth now with renewed determination to celebrate this fortunate misfortune. Enjoy the meat and savor the hunt. I love wild hogs, but I will kill every single one of them that I see.
Well said Jesse. You have made yourself a better hog hunter.
(I understand that Jesse operates a restaurant in Austin called DAI DUE. I haven’t been, I avoid Austin. I prefer College Station.)
Porcus Hogrelius
Make Yourself a Better Hog Hunter
