By Bill Wilson, Wilson Combat
The gear you need for successful hog hunting depends on the method you plan to use in your quest to kill a hog. Variables of hog hunting are whether you are going to hunt day or night, spot and stalk or from a blind, and whether your planning to shoot a single hog or to try to help a farmer out by killing as many pigs out of a group as possible. If you plan to hunt from a blind or even spot and stalk in daylight hours, all you need is a good pair of binoculars and any suitable caliber rifle with a decent scope of at least 4x on it. However, if you plan to hunt after dark when most of the hogs are out, you need better equipment. At a minimum, you want a good light gathering illuminated reticle scope with a 40mm or larger objective lens and a good LED light. However, if you are going to be a serious hog hunter, you will have to step up to either night vision or thermal, with thermal being the best option these days. Currently, you can buy quality thermal for less than quality night vision, and it works better for hunting hogs, and the quality keeps going up while the prices keep coming down. The only night vision product I still use is an AN/PVS-14 for driving in the dark since you can look through glass with night vision, and you can't with thermal. I'm a big fan of Pulsar thermal products and find them to be reasonably priced and of high quality.
A bolt action rifle is adequate if you're trying to shoot a hog, but if your mission is the help a rancher or farmer out by eradicating as many hogs off the property as possible, then a semi-auto is required. Since the editor only gives me +/- 500 words for these, I'll cut to the chase and list the gear I use.
AR platform rifle in one of these calibers: 300 HAM'R, .308 Winchester, or .358 Winchester, depending on the situation.
Trijicon Accupoint 3-9x40 green dot/crosshair on my day rifle and either a Pulsar Trail XQ50 or Thermion XM38 thermal scope on my night rifle. Once the new Thermion XQ50 scope becomes available, I think it will be a great choice, and I'm anxious to get one.
This essential gear works well for me, no matter what type of hog hunting I do.
Another bit of information you might find useful is to outfit your hunting vehicle with Xenon HID lights of around 5000 Kelvin and wire them in to stay on when you shut the engine off. The light these put out seems to appear to hogs as natural daylight and doesn't scare them at all; it's like they think the sun came up early. I've often driven up to within 75 yards or so of a group of hogs with the wind in my favor, then killed the engine, and watched them for as long as I wanted to without the hogs showing any sign of concern. Also when hunting hogs at night with thermal or NV keep in mind that a small calf or deer can sometimes look like a hog so observe and watch for the animal to raise it's head, if the head comes above the back then it's a deer or calf since hogs can't raise their head this much.
I hope some of this information will be useful to you and welcome to the beautiful world of hog hunting.