It was almost 2 a.m. on a moonless October night at a ranch in Caldwell County, just northeast of San Antonio. I sat next to Eli Smith in his small utility terrain vehicle, the engine off. Behind us, the cargo bed held a kennel containing six dogs he had trained to track feral hogs. Smith is a large man with a keen appetite for killing invasive swine—he hunts them as often as four days a week. “I kill ’em any way I can,” he told me. “I shoot ’em with the AR-15. I set the dogs on ’em and catch ’em and stick ’em with the knife.” He prefers the second method, which hunters call pig stickin’.
To my right sat Smith’s friend Patrick Plant, clutching a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle outfitted with a noise suppressor and a laser sight. We had entered a field on the ranch as quietly as possible. The dogs stayed silent—they knew the situation. In the dark just ahead of us lurked a group of wild hogs, called a sounder, that Smith had spotted using a thermal scope. This, our third ambush of the night, would go much like the other two, employing a combination of tactical acumen, bloodcurdling ruthlessness, and Dukes of Hazzard–style antics. Smith turned on the ignition, and as soon as the engine roared to life, he hit the accelerator but kept the lights off, sending us hurtling into the darkness at 45 miles per hour. As the thirty or so hogs ran for their lives, kicking up dust, Smith flipped on his brights. A cacophony of barking erupted from the kennel. Smith steered us so that the sounder was to our right, in full view of Plant, who raised his rifle, steadied his aim against the UTV’s bouncing, and started firing.
After Plant shot three hogs, a small one tried running across our vehicle’s path. Smith turned toward it and ran it over, killing it. He kept driving, and we came upon a bigger specimen, which Plant shot in its hindquarters, crippling it. Smith drove until we made it to the fence, just in time to see the last of the beasts wriggle their way under a gap and disappear into the night.
We needed to collect the dead bodies and line them up along the property fence. (Smith leaves his kills “to nature.”) But first, we circled back to the crippled pig. The dogs howled. They hadn’t been out of the kennel since we left Smith’s home a few hours earlier. “Let’s give them some exercise,” he said as he hopped out and opened the crate. The dogs burst out and ran straight for the wounded animal, which weighed about 180 pounds, with tusks that were one-and-a-half inches long. It wasn’t huge by hog standards—boars can grow to 400 pounds and wield tusks as long as five inches—but was strong enough to severely injure a dog or a person with a swift jerk of its head. Still, against the power of the pack, it was helpless. The canines ran circles around the enraged creature, barking and growling and clamping their jaws on its legs and ears.
Smith looked on with the pride of a high school football coach watching his team savage its opponent under the Friday night lights.
“You ready to stick it?” he asked.
I at first didn’t think the question was directed at me. Smith grinned. Plant handed me his hunting knife and said, “Don’t worry, I got you” as we walked toward the howling, squealing scrum.
When Eli Smith isn’t slaughtering hogs, he’s doting on his wife and three young daughters, leading the Lockhart branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and tending to his day job as a farrier for high-end show horses, many of whom belong to famous clients. For a few years he shod George Strait’s horses. He calls it health care for the animals. “There’s an old saying: ‘No foot, no horse,’ ” he says of the work, which he admits is “very high stress.”
Smith devotes at least as much care to his volunteer role as church president. He’s responsible for its finances and charitable giving while also serving as a spiritual leader. After Sunday services he stays behind, often for hours, as members line up outside his office to ask for guidance or just to talk.
Smith’s faith requires that he abstain from some of the common pleasures of country life, including alcohol, coffee, tobacco, and cursing. If he gets really worked up—which he often does when discussing feral pigs—he’ll go so far as to use “fetchin,’ ” as in “These farmers are taking it in the fetchin’ teeth because of the hogs.”
And he’s fetchin’ right. The state’s feral hogs, now numbering some 2.6 million, have long been a menace to Texans, especially those who make their living off the land. The animals inflict almost $120 million worth of damage to Texas’s agriculture industry every year, and examples of that destruction are all around Caldwell County.
A few weeks after the hunt with Smith, I went back to the site of my first hog stabbing. The ranch belongs to Bodey Langford, the owner since 1974 of Langford Cattle Company. He met me outside his home wearing bullhide boots, a handsome yellow pearl-snap shirt tucked into a pair of starched jeans, and a straw hat. Langford’s daughter went to school with Smith. “Eli was chasing pigs pretty hard as a kid. Now he’s a grown man, and he’s still chasing them,” Langford said. “I don’t think he’s got a bad bone in his body or a meanness in him, but he’s got a vendetta against pigs. He’s a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde,” he added with a grin.
We hopped in Langford’s truck, and he showed me around some of his three thousand acres. He raises cattle for breeding and grows crops, including hay, oats, and sorghum, all of which the wild boars love to dig up and devour. He estimates that every year 10 percent of his land is disturbed or destroyed by the creatures, but it would be a lot worse without Smith around. “I’ve been trying to pay Eli for years,” he said, “but he won’t take any money for what he does.”
Langford pointed to a field protected by hog fencing—mesh wire in a grid pattern—which costs twice as much as standard barbed wire cattle fencing. He drove me to another field pigs had recently rooted through. Even though he was going only about 5 miles per hour, the truck bucked and lurched violently, causing me to nearly smack my head against the passenger window. “A farmer on a tractor, you spend eight or ten hours a day riding over those holes, and you’re really sore,” he said, noting that equipment can also be damaged.
Other landowners in Caldwell who have enlisted Smith’s help have seen years when a 10 percent loss would’ve been a blessing. I visited Troy Swift, the owner of Swift River Pecans and the president of the Texas Pecan Growers Association, at his company’s headquarters just as he was preparing to harvest this season’s crop, which includes the Pawnee varietal. Last year he lost 25 percent of his Pawnee yield. “It was a perfect storm of bad weather and the pigs,” he said. Swift is spending $10,000 to install an electric fence around one of his orchards in an attempt to keep out the swine.
As Caldwell County grows, so does the difficulty of hunting hogs. Lockhart has become a popular exurb for Texans priced out of Austin, about 35 miles to the north. The town’s population is on track to double by 2040 thanks to rapid expansions of housing subdivisions, which are often built on land previously used for farming and ranching. Smith, by law, must receive explicit permission from owners to hunt on their property, and city ordinances forbid discharging a firearm near homes. Some landowners aren’t eager to host hunters. “The hogs learn where we can’t get to them, so they nest there and then at night go out and cause damage to other people’s land and then retreat to safety before we can catch them,” Smith told me.
Said Swift: “The problem is the hogs never give up. People do.”
Pig stickin’ may seem like an especially bloody kind of hunting, but it boasts an aristocratic history. It was a popular pastime for British cavalrymen, who often came from upper-crust backgrounds, in colonial India. They would hunt wild boars on horseback with a nine-foot lance; the Raj hosted an annual tournament.
In Texas, pig stickin’ is less a matter of sport than of practicality.
It is a quick, efficient way of dispatching a hog—when done correctly. A skilled pig sticker slices into the animal just behind its shoulder and then cuts down to its breastbone and into its lungs and heart in one quick, fluid motion. The pig dies in a matter of seconds.
That’s not how it went for me that night on Langford’s ranch. Even with the help of Smith and Plant, who flipped the boar on its back and held it down as I stabbed it, it took what felt like a long minute of me frantically wiggling the knife until finally a jet of blood burst out and my prey wheezed and died. It felt needlessly cruel. I didn’t think I’d want to go hog hunting again.
But something about the experience stayed with me. A few weeks afterward, I asked Smith if I could join him and a few of his friends on another outing, this time for a daytime hunt. Our first excursion, in October, had been at night because it was too hot for the dogs during the day. This one began just before sunrise, after the hogs had returned to their nests, many in nearly impenetrable thickets, which made the canines invaluable. They could flush the hogs out into the open for shooters or hold them at bay long enough for a hunter to use a knife, including in terrain where shooting is impractical. The brush can be too thick to spot a pig from just a few yards away, and even if a shot were possible, the bullet could easily hit a dog.
This time I only wanted to observe. I ducked and crawled through thick brush with Smith and his hunting partners and watched them use a knife expertly to dispatch several boar. It was sweaty, dirty work but also full of adrenaline, adventure, and a sense of service for the nearby farmers and ranchers who now had fewer hogs to worry about. It was hunting boiled down to its most elemental ingredients: a human armed with only a sharp weapon and a pack of trained dogs.
The call was primal, and I can still hear it. I just need to improve my knife work.
Creature Comforts
Hunt for wild boar at a Texas lodge.
Pig stickin’ ain’t for everyone. These lodges offer cozy accommodations for hunters who prefer bows and rifles.
East Texas
Texas Hog Hunting Outfitters
At their Mount Pleasant ranch, two hours east of Dallas, longtime hunting guide Bruce Hunnicutt and his wife, Becky, use feeders to attract sounders, and well-placed box stands are perfectly suited to novice hunters who are getting comfortable with a rifle or bow.
Central Texas
Independence Ranch
The focus at this lodge in Waelder, about an hour east of San Antonio, is on spotting and stalking. The ranch boasts a “Honey Hole”—a swampy patch
that attracts monstrous hogs.
Panhandle
Plaska Lodge
Owner and guide Oren Don Molloy has been hunting all his life on the land around Memphis, ninety minutes southeast of Amarillo, near Caprock Canyons State Park. The terrain may be rugged, but the accommodations are warm and welcoming, making it ideal for a hunt in the winter, when boars have fattened up after gorging all autumn.
West Texas
SandFork Hog Hunting Ranch
In Anson, two hours southeast of Lubbock, Brice Blancet is living out his childhood dream of running a hunting lodge. He also offers a shooting range for both rifle and bow. Bring your rod: There’s a fishing pond near the bunkhouse.
