Feral hog disaster (This is kinda gross...)

S

Smurfette

500+ Posts
So, a couple of weeks ago I stopped by the Farmer's Market in the Triangle after work. I came across a guy selling meat-- and I noticed one of the things he was selling was feral hog. I'd head LHF68 talk about really liking it, so I stopped and talked to the guy. I ended up buying a ham/leg that was 18 bucks. (Pretty high, but it was big enough for multiple meals, so I thought, what the hell?) The guy said I should just season it with herbs and bake it for a couple hours-- easy enough.

So I go to cook the thing tonight. I season it up,and when I do I notice it still has a part where you can see where the hairs were shaved off, but there was hair under the skin. No biggie-- hair's in the skin and I'll pull the skin off after it's cooked, so put it in, yadda yadda. The thing seems to be smelling pretty good and appears to cook well.

When it's done, I take it out and start cutting it up. As I make the first cut, I come across a big chunk of hair-- under the skin-- it's going all the way down to the bone. I start trying to cut it out, and keep coming across more and more hair.

So, at this point I call LHF68 into the kitchen for help, thinking there's some weird feral hog thing that I don't know about. He starts digging at the thing without success... and eventually gives up and starts cutting the rest of it up. There's hair through the whole thing, and it smells like meat mixed with burned hair.

I've added a couple of pics- don't know if you'll be able to see the hair because I took them w/ my cell phone.

hog1.jpg


That's the skin-- keep in mind all that hair was under the skin and down in the meat...

hog2.jpg


That's the meatier part-- you can kinda see the hairs, (they were white instead of black down this deep.)

Anyway, we threw it all out-- wouldn't even feed it to the dogs.

I figured someone around here might have experience with feral hog... anyone ever had something like this happen before?
 
I'll never waste time on wild pig again. Had a perfect sized 50 lb sow that should have been awesome to eat. But even after brining and smoking, it still tasted just ok, and I really didn't like the texture. No mas, I'm done before I dull a single more knife on pig.
 
There had to be something seriously wrong for hair to grow like that. I wish I could have shown it better... the hair was coming out all through the muscle.

Well, at least my house doesn't smell like it anymore.
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My father is always smoking feral hog out at the ranch and usually gives it to the exchange students. I don't care for it either. I've trapped a lot of hogs over the years and the best advice about them I ever got came from a friend whose business used to include a hog-killing floor. He said the first, and I mean VERY FIRST, item of business with hogs or deer is to get the skin off. You'll never ever see a fine piece of beef being transported warm in the back of a truck with the skin on. The OP was going to have a nasty meal in my opinion even without the hair in the meat issue.

On that issue, I'm going to throw out that maybe the hog was injured in a fight?
 
I know someone who died from blood poisoning after cleaning some wild hogs, so I'm paranoid about cleaning them. A friend I go hog hunting with always insists on cleaning them if we get a small one. After eating what we got, it's really not worth messing with them in my opinion.
 
I obviously agree it's not worth messing with, but if one insists, another thing to do is quickly remove all the fat. Especially if it is not going right on the grill or smoker. It goes rancid very quickly and these are pigs that work for a living. Their fat doesn't come from laying around talking to cute spiders and industrious barn rats.
 
I trap a few hogs a year and feed them corn for several weeks before butchering them. I wouldn't want to shoot and eat one that had been foraging for food. Hogs will eat some nasty stuff.
 
I'm about to reveal my irredeemable and totally cureless degree of redneckiness.

I've heard that wild pigs will kill and eat a calf, though I've never actually seen evidence of this. I've read that when they kill a fawn, or a calf, or a goat, they leave nothing, not even a drop of blood on the ground, unless they're disturbed before devouring the entire thing.

I drove up on one eating a ******* turtle that was still alive. I was conflicted with laughter and genuine horror as I shouted out, "Really? Seriously?"

We have a deisel tank with a tiny drip. About once every week they stop by the tank to eat the dirt that has soaked up the deisel. They'll shave off about four inches of deisel-soaked earth and move on.

They'll eat cow ****, horse ****, their own **** and any type of **** that you could possibly imagine. They'll eat anything. They're worse than the Japanese. They'll eat each other. I've heard that if you castrate one and toss the remains on the ground he'll eat that, even while simultaneously squealing from the pain. Just typing that out mad me gag with a miniature convulsion. They'd probably eat you if you stood still long enough.

I could never consciously support any form of genocide, unless the targets were feral hogs and Philadelphia Eagles fans. If nature has its version of degenerate scum, then it comes in the form of the feral hog. They are evil, hideous, godless, rancid *************.

So, knowing all of this, sure, I've eaten some.

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My rule for eating feral hogs - never eat one that is over 50 lbs.

I worked on a ranch in South Bexar county when I was in highscool, and the hogs were starting to get out of hand. There was a sow with 10-12 piglets, still really small, I'd bet the didn't dress out more than 15-20 pounds a piece. They were probably still nursing, or if not, they had just been weened. I had a .22 rifle with a 50 round banana clip, I managed to shoot and kill all but 2 of the piglets. I gave most of the dead feral piglets to the mexican ranchhand who lived on the place, but saved 2 that I cleaned and barbecued whole. They tasted great... like pork cabrito.
 
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