Cleanly killing a hog takes precision shooting due to the size of the area you must place your shot into. Consider this, a brain shot requires shot placement into a 2-inch area, a spine shot into a maximum of 3-inch area, and a solid lung shot into a 5-inch area. This means as a worst case you must place your shot into a 5-inch circle. 

We frequently get guests and clients here at the ranch to hog hunt that shoot very well from a bench rest, but they struggle terribly when making a shot from a field position. In my opinion, if you’re going to be a hunter of animals with fur you must learn how to shoot well from various field positions. Unless you are very close to the hog, shooting offhand without any support is not a good plan. Therefore, I consider shooting sticks of either bi-pod or tri-pod design a necessity. Like a flashlight, shooting sticks are must-have equipment. 

There are three basic field positions I routinely use when hunting hogs and I’ll list them in order of steadiness. Kneeling on sticks, standing on sticks and the use of a tree for support. I probably shoot 90 percent of the hogs I kill from kneeling with the aid of a bi-pod and the remaining 10 percent from either standing using a bi-pod or using a tree for support. With the proper technique kneeling, using either a bi-pod or tri-pod is a very stable position where a precision shot can be made from a considerable distance. As an example, I killed two nice White-tailed deer bucks during the 2018/2019 season from more than 300 yards away while shooting from a kneeling position using a bi-pod. Obviously, a tri-pod is the most solid, but the fact that they are heavy and slow to deploy isn’t worth the tradeoff in lightweight and rapid deployment of the bi-pod for me.