Never hunted but thinking about it - advice?

[anomie]

http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/regulations ... unt/means/

I went and started reading other sections of that, and ran across this -> "It is unlawful to possess a deer or any part of a deer that has been hit by a motor vehicle."

What's the reasoning for that? People claiming they 'hit a deer' when they were really poaching? People hitting deer on purpose (this seems like a terrible plan)?

I knew a guy in the service who told me a story about his dad hitting a deer once and they called somebody and someone (a cop or game warden or something like that) came out & checked things out and put some kind of tag on it - and they kept it and got whatever meat they could get out of it (he wasn't from Texas).

[doncom]

I've hunted all my life and still hunt most weeks. Here's some random thoughts.
1. You'll learn a lot more if you can tag along with friends who hunt instead of paying someone. It may be harder to arrange but in the long run will be worth it. Consider offering to fill feeders, clean up around camp, cook - IF you are good at it, and anything else that needs to be done in exchange for learning how to clean an animal. At some point you might be invited to kill a hog or a doe. In any event, you'll learn a lot more in this environment than on a paid-guided hunt.
2. Consider getting a larger rifle. I don't want to start a flame war, but I've seen far too many animals lost because of less than perfect shot placement with a .223. A poorly placed shot by only an inch or so can easily result in a lost animal. Either on a paid hunt or as a guest, the last thing you want is a wounded animal that's lost or takes hours and hours to track and recover.
3. I regularly get calls from landowners who don't allow hunting on their property asking me to come trap or shoot hogs. These requests come because of comments from other land owners where I've hunted. And it happens simply because of several things....I'm a stickler for safety! and the landowners know it. I pickup trash...fix fences...and do a lot of little things that landowners notice. I don't do it so that they will brag on me or say something nice to their neighbors...I do it because they have been nice enough to invite/allow me on their property and I want to make sure they know I appreciate it. I recently had a request to remove hogs that invaded a neighborhood. I've trapped 3 and caught/killed three more with dogs. The landowner is very pleased and has given me the gate combination and invited me to hunt dove anytime I want. We're both happy.
And, finally, I would suggest that you consider getting a hunting lease. Join with a couple of friends and find a small property that you can afford. Hunting on a lease is not really that much more (if any) expensive than most other hobbies. (have you priced a bass boat or paid green fees lately?). Remember, even though you are paying the landowner for the right to hunt, you are still their guest. Think about it like renting a guest room in their home. Respect their property and things will go well.

Good luck! Hunting is great fun. (Sorry this got so long.)

[baldeagle]

In preparation for hog hunting, I did a lot of reading on TexasBoars.com. Doncom is right. Shot placement is key with smaller calibers. Far too many people want to shoot pigs in the head. In order to make that work you need a high velocity high grain round - .308 at least traveling at 3000 fps or better - to drive it through a hogs skull. If you're going to hunt hogs with smaller calibers you need to shoot them in the neck, directly in front of the shoulder. That's where the hog's vital organs are; heart and lungs. To shoot a hog in the head with a .223, you need to put it through the ear hole, which is a small and moving target that only the best of shots can hit. The neck, directly in front of the shoulder moves a lot less so is easier to hit correctly, and your chances of a DRT shot are much higher. Even if the hog runs he won't go far, because the internal blood loss will quickly drain his energy.

Bottom line is, the bigger the caliber, the better chance you have of dropping the hog in its tracks.

[anomie]

2. Consider getting a larger rifle. I don't want to start a flame war, but I've seen far too many animals lost because of less than perfect shot placement with a .223. A poorly placed shot by only an inch or so can easily result in a lost animal. Either on a paid hunt or as a guest, the last thing you want is a wounded animal that's lost or takes hours and hours to track and recover.

Part of the reason I mentioned it is, if I'm going to take the .223/5.56 AR, I'd want to be hunting something that was appropriate for - I saw a few pics on the board here where game was taken with an AR. I do own an AR-10, too, but I bought it used and it gets stovepipes/feeding problems more often than I'd like. (I really need to just take that in to a gunsmith and/or just figure out what the problem is and get it fixed up but haven't yet), where my newer AR is just solid.

I've been thinking about buying a bolt action (something like a Remington 700) in .30-06 or .308 but it might be a bit, I bought the 5.56 AR not too long ago (thankfully, after prices had come back to sanity). I also have a shotgun, but it's really a home defense gun with a minimum-legal-length barrel (18.5", I think - I used to shoot skeet with it back in California, the local range was fine with that but wanted a longer barrel for trap) so I don't think it's really appropriate for hunting.

[Abraham]

There's something not mentioned - hunting and killing is gory and stinky. Skinning and gutting can be a shocking experience for someone who's not been around it.

Plus, you may (or not) feel bad after killing an animal that was just trying to make a living, if you will.

I've been a hunter for years and still sometimes feel a bit of sadness after I've killed a deer or a hog.

I'm not trying to discourage you from hunting, but you seem somewhat ambivalent... If you're not completely sure this is something you want to get into, perhaps you could get invited on a deer or hog hunt and not shoot, but go just to get a feel for what it's about.

Much like an earlier poster suggested, offer to cook or do whatever labor is necessary to get an invite.

You might love it or find it's just not for you.

[anomie]

There's something not mentioned - hunting and killing is gory and stinky. Skinning and gutting can be a shocking experience for someone who's not been around it.

I expect that, completely, and as I said before, wouldn't want to avoid it. I don't think I'd have any trouble, but it may be something you just don't know until you do it.

Plus, you may (or not) feel bad after killing an animal that was just trying to make a living, if you will.

I've been a hunter for years and still sometimes feel a bit of sadness after I've killed a deer or a hog.

Fear of doing it without knowing what I was doing - that's where any apparent ambivalence is coming from. Again, might be something you find out by doing - but if I knew the meat was going to get eaten, etc, I think I'd be OK - this isn't something I've not thought about.

I know I'd feel bad if I were killing something for no purpose, but if I didn't think I could kill an animal I wouldn't have posted. I'm not sure how to explain this better - we have feral cats that run around the neighborhood - we trapped 'em, had them fixed, released them (the mom had a litter, we caught the kittens and the mom too) - they take down squirrels and birds and sometimes leave pieces, etc in the back yard, and will sometimes be back there eating what they've taken, and it gets messy - not as messy as I'd expect dressing a deer to be, but messy nonetheless. My wife gets grossed out - I just see it as nature being nature, and I don't get sad for the cow when I have a nice steak, and the pictures here in the forum haven't bothered me. (They are just pictures, of course, so IRL might be different, but I don't think I'd have a problem).

The biggest thing I'm worried about is going out and screwing it up somehow (hurt an animal but not kill it, killing an animal and not knowing what to do then, that kind of thing - if I decide not to, it will be because I don't feel like I know enough, or I'm not good enough with the rifle yet, something along those lines. I want to learn, it just seems different than when, for instance, I decided to learn to pick locks - there'd have been no harm done if when I ordered some lock cylinders off ebay, I'd failed to pick them. Hunting just seems different in that regard, if I go out and hunt and screw something up, like taking a shot at an animal and hitting it but *not* killing it, without knowing what to do then - that would be terrible. I've learned how to do a lot of things just by going out and snarfing in all the info I could, and then actually doing it - but hunting, I'd want someone there to figuratively smack me in the head if I was about to do something dumb. If that makes sense).

If you're not completely sure this is something you want to get into, perhaps you could get invited on a deer or hog hunt and not shoot, but go just to get a feel for what it's about.

Much like an earlier poster suggested, offer to cook or do whatever labor is necessary to get an invite.

I've definitely been thinking about that, too, and I appreciate your comments.

[anomie]

Found some videos on dressing a deer, it seems pretty much like cleaning a fish in that the idea is to pull it all out in one piece if possible.

[JSThane]

[quote="jmra"Any centerfire cartridge can be used to hunt deer in Texas. Rimfire cartridges can not be used for deer.

Interesting article about deer hunting and the .223 round. (Personally, my family hunts big game with anything from a 243 to a 300 Winmag, but I know plenty of people who have taken deer just as effectively with the .223. I've even seen a woman take down a buck with a .22 hornet.)

http://www.americanhunter.org/mobile/bl ... 670&cid=56

And here is the reg:
"white-tailed deer, mule deer, desert bighorn sheep, and pronghorn antelope may NOT be hunted with rimfire ammunition of any caliber."
http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/regulations ... unt/means/[/quote]

223 is perfectly legal to use on whitetail deer in Texas.

I know of folks that ]elk hunt with a .30-30, and fairly successfully, too, despite the fact the cartridge is "too weak to be effective." In the right hands, even .22 LR can be devastating, properly placed.

However, I believed the -state- had declared it was too weak to hunt with. Thanks for the heads-up! I may have given more than one coworker bad info regarding hunting in Texas, based on this misconception. At least I can avoid repeating this error in future.

[baldeagle]

Found some videos on dressing a deer, it seems pretty much like cleaning a fish in that the idea is to pull it all out in one piece if possible.

There's plenty of Youtube videos on field dressing, skinning and quartering hogs. More than enough to build the confidence to do it yourself.

[The Annoyed Man]

Oh, hi there :) I grew up in the Yucca Valley/Joshua Tree/29 Palms area, if you know where that is.

My family used to camp at Indian Cove campground in the Joshua Tree Nat'l Monument every year with a couple of other Caltech families. I love it out there.

[puma guy]

Found some videos on dressing a deer, it seems pretty much like cleaning a fish in that the idea is to pull it all out in one piece if possible.

Yup.

One thing you don't want to do is to puncture the stomach or intestines while slitting open the belly. You might have seen knives with a gut-hook; after making a careful nick in the belly, the knife is turned over and the point of that blunt hook is inserted into the nick - and pretty much unzip the belly with the (protected) sharp edge of the hook:

[ Image ]

If you don't have a knife with a gut-hook, you can clamp your blade edge-up between two fingers of your weak hand and unzip the belly that way, using your fingers as a guide and to nudge any intestinal parts out of the way.

Andy is right and the abdomen will be like a balloon pushed by the rumen. The first cut is like a surgeon's incision. Gently cutting through the skin a layer at a time until you get to the membrane lining the abdomen. The trick is to cut through it without cutting the gut. I use an old Buck 116 Caper and a Kevlar filleting glove under the knife as I slit my way from the belly to sternum and back to the pelvis, the way Andy describes. I used to wiggle the blade through the sternum cartilage, but now I use a tree branch lopper to cut through it. Works great! The method we use gets everything from the genitals to voice box all in one piece. No tying off the bladder and all that stuff.

[birdman253]

In preparation for hog hunting, I did a lot of reading on TexasBoars.com. Doncom is right. Shot placement is key with smaller calibers. Far too many people want to shoot pigs in the head. In order to make that work you need a high velocity high grain round - .308 at least traveling at 3000 fps or better - to drive it through a hogs skull. If you're going to hunt hogs with smaller calibers you need to shoot them in the neck, directly in front of the shoulder. That's where the hog's vital organs are; heart and lungs. To shoot a hog in the head with a .223, you need to put it through the ear hole, which is a small and moving target that only the best of shots can hit. The neck, directly in front of the shoulder moves a lot less so is easier to hit correctly, and your chances of a DRT shot are much higher. Even if the hog runs he won't go far, because the internal blood loss will quickly drain his energy.

Bottom line is, the bigger the caliber, the better chance you have of dropping the hog in its tracks.

I respectfully disagree with the statement I have highlighted in red. In the last 15 years, I have killed about a dozen hogs, ranging in size from 125 lbs., to boars topping 300. All have been head shots (I hate tracking wounded hogs, so I always take head shots to drop them in their tracks.) All these hogs have been shot with a .270 Win, using 140 grain, Hornady Custom ammunition.

The only time I have seen an issue with a head shot, a friend of mine shot a 250 lb. boar with a 30.06, using a ballistic tip bullet. Hog went down immediately, but when we walked up to get him, he was still alive. We finished him off with a pistol. When we processed him, I skinned out the head to check. The ballistic tip bullet had hit him in the side of the head, penetrated the skin, and then just disappeared. Our guess is that it simply expanded and failed to penetrate, due to the design. I've never had this problem with my .270, but I refuse to use ballistic tip ammo after this.

[The Annoyed Man]

In preparation for hog hunting, I did a lot of reading on TexasBoars.com. Doncom is right. Shot placement is key with smaller calibers. Far too many people want to shoot pigs in the head. In order to make that work you need a high velocity high grain round - .308 at least traveling at 3000 fps or better - to drive it through a hogs skull. If you're going to hunt hogs with smaller calibers you need to shoot them in the neck, directly in front of the shoulder. That's where the hog's vital organs are; heart and lungs. To shoot a hog in the head with a .223, you need to put it through the ear hole, which is a small and moving target that only the best of shots can hit. The neck, directly in front of the shoulder moves a lot less so is easier to hit correctly, and your chances of a DRT shot are much higher. Even if the hog runs he won't go far, because the internal blood loss will quickly drain his energy.

Bottom line is, the bigger the caliber, the better chance you have of dropping the hog in its tracks.

I respectfully disagree with the statement I have highlighted in red. In the last 15 years, I have killed about a dozen hogs, ranging in size from 125 lbs., to boars topping 300. All have been head shots (I hate tracking wounded hogs, so I always take head shots to drop them in their tracks.) All these hogs have been shot with a .270 Win, using 140 grain, Hornady Custom ammunition.

The only time I have seen an issue with a head shot, a friend of mine shot a 250 lb. boar with a 30.06, using a ballistic tip bullet. Hog went down immediately, but when we walked up to get him, he was still alive. We finished him off with a pistol. When we processed him, I skinned out the head to check. The ballistic tip bullet had hit him in the side of the head, penetrated the skin, and then just disappeared. Our guess is that it simply expanded and failed to penetrate, due to the design. I've never had this problem with my .270, but I refuse to use ballistic tip ammo after this.

I think that any of the .25 caliber and up with the right bullet would be more than sufficient. I remember back in the early 1970s when a guy that I worked for showed me pictures of a boar hunt on Catalina Island (I lived in CA at the time). In one picture was shown the head shot entrance and exit wounds on the boar's head. The entrance wound was barely noticeable. The exit wound was catastrophic, looking like an exploded watermelon.

The cartridge used was a .243, and Catalina boar are real russian boar, not feral hogs or some hybrid. I honestly don't know if a russian boar is any harder to kill than a feral hog, but I remember that that exit wound was one for the "OMG" record book. A friend who has taken me along hog hunting a couple of times uses a .270 to good effect. I don't know what kind of ammo he uses. I was carrying a .308 with 165 grain Federal Fusion ammo the last time, but I never got a shot off.

I found this amusing picture on google about boar-hunting on Catalina.

[Abraham]

I've mentioned this before, but since caliber for hogs is being discussed: I've killed two hogs (75/80 lb and a 250lb) with a 17 Cal. HMR - both head shots DRT.

I used FMJ's that I ordered form Graf and Sons as I've never been able to find them in any local sporting goods stores.

Both rounds penetrated, but didn't exit.