I’ve been called out to a lot of strange places over the years, but this one might be near the top of the list. A gas plant in Florida had a hog problem. These hogs were slipping in and out through the fence line, tearing up the property, and with workers on site around the clock, it had turned into a real liability. So they called me in.
I brought my right-hand man Eric along, plus a camera guy named Travis who was visiting from Chicago. The concrete jungle, as I like to say, is a little different than ours.
Before we even let the dogs off lead, I had to think through the layout. I had scouted the property beforehand and spotted some low areas with gator holes and small ponds right at the front end. We were not putting the dogs down in there. So we moved them through that stretch first, on lead, headlamps on, picking our way past the water before letting them open up.
There was one more wrinkle I hadn’t expected. Right next door to the gas plant, there was another industrial complex running what sounded like jet engines. It was loud. When I scouted the place earlier, those engines weren’t running. Now they were, and we could barely hear ourselves think. That’s a real problem when you’re hunting with dogs, because if they get on a hog 200 yards out and start barking, you might not hear a thing. I stayed glued to the GPS and kept a close eye on where they were working.
It didn’t take long. Biscuit picked up a scent trail and went to work. Once the other dogs followed her in, we were moving. Eric got there first. He always does. I had taken what I thought was a shortcut, running up the road and cutting back in, telling myself I was finally going to beat him to the hog. I got close, didn’t see his light, heard the dogs barking and the pig squealing, and figured I had it. Then I walked up and there he was, already holding her, dogs settled, looking like he’d been waiting on me for ten minutes. That’s Eric.
We had a big pregnant sow caught and tied. I’m licensed by the state of Florida to keep hogs alive and sell them as livestock. She went to a tree near some water to cool off, and we kept pressing.
Round two meant crossing a marsh. Wet boots all around, Travis included, though he didn’t have much of a choice. The dogs pushed the next hog around the back side of an old abandoned racetrack on the property. When they bayed it up, it was another stud of a hog. Another big pregnant sow. Two pregnant sows in one night. Between the two of them, we were looking at roughly 400 pounds of hog and probably upwards of 20 piglets that were never going to hit the ground inside that fence line.
The second one we had to stick right there. We were in a nasty spot, deep in the brush, and there was no clean way to get her out alive. So we ended it there.
We made our way back toward the front of the property. Soaked, muddy, tired. But that gas plant had a serious problem when we showed up, and by the end of the night, we had pulled two large pregnant hogs off the property and put serious pressure on anything else that might have been thinking about slipping through that fence.
That’s a lot of conservation for one night’s work. And Biscuit, who had only recently recovered from a serious diaphragm injury that I honestly wasn’t sure she’d survive, caught her first hog since coming back. That right there made the whole trip worth it.
