Hard Luck Mulefoot Hog

I got a chance to hunt with a buddy of mine (Russ) on his land to help deal with feral hogs and to demo my new Pulsar N550 Digisight night and day vision scope for him. The scope was mounted to a Marlin 1895 .45-70 loaded with 325 gr. Leverevolution ammo.

His property is in Montague County, just east of the county seat. We sat in one of his box stands that is located about 140 yards from his feeder. About an hour after we arrived and nearing the end of twilight, Russ spotted a pig under the feeder with his binoculars and told me to shoot it. I could not see 50 yards with the unaided eye and had to ask him to tell me which of the two feeders visible from our location had the hog.

As I readied my rifle, Russ commented that it was a big pig and estimated the hog's weight at 150 lbs. Needless to say, I didn't need encouragement to shoot it. While I could not see 140 yards with my naked eye, the scope could and did without using IR illumination. I am really starting to like the scope!

I waited until the pig turned sideways and fired. He ran. Russ said he thought he heard the bullet impact. Turns out, the pig was impacted below/behind the ribs as the pig was quartering away, entering the chest cavity from below. There was no exit wound. We waited a bit and then went looking for it. First we went to the feeder where the pig was shot at in hopes of finding a blood trail. There was none. We looked for fresh hog tracks and also found none. So much for tracking it – darned stealth pig. There were hog tracks under and around the feeder, but none were fresh or heading off in the right direction.

So we headed off in the direction it ran which took the pig through some dense vegetation. Still no blood trail. Right after the shot, we had heard quite a bit of noise when the pig went through it and thought that the last 20 seconds or so of noise was the pig's death shuffle. After a brief search, we found him about 100 yards away from the feeder, behind trees and brush from us. The reason why we didn't find a blood trail was because the hog's bullet entry wasn't bleeding. The reason why we didn't find this pig's tracks was because the pig wasn't making normal pig tracks (explained below).

So we loaded the pig in the back of golf cart. As this point, Russ revised his weight estimate for the hog to be at least 200 lbs. I could not tell one way or the other. In my world, there are two weights of hogs. There are hogs you can lift yourself and hogs that you can't. So we took his heart girth measurement. He turned out to be 220 lbs.

Examination the hog revealed some interesting things. His tusks were broken.. He smelled awful (my first stinky boar). Also, it turned out that the hog is mulefooted (hence not finding typical hog tracks). This condition is fairly rare in feral hogs, apparently being able to be traced back to breeding hogs for this condition back in the 1800s, if I recall correctly, though from what I find online, they may have first come to Texas with the Spanish. As a breed, the height of their popularity in the US apparently was in the late 1899s to early 1900s and today they are considered amongst the rarest of pig breeds with just a few hundred registered individuals. Being mulefooted is a condition called syndactyly. It results in the pig having a single hoof per foot (like a mule or horse) instead of cloven hooves.

And last, this pig had been spied on the property for the last several months because of a specific wound. The hog was missing a large chunk of flesh over the thoracic vertebrae (the hump) The gash was oriented diagonally across the top of his back and it is still an open wound at tge center of it. The amount of flesh missing was about the area of a softball-sized circle and nearly an inch deep at the center. This pig had not lived a cushy life.

So the new scope worked well. This pig is my longest distance shot and recovered pig. And in what is now a tradition for my family, I will buy a tub of chocolate chip cookie dough for us to celebrate!

That's neat never seen that before

I killed one about 25 years ago in Burnet county. Yours is the only other one I have seen. If I ever get one in a trap I am going to try to keep him. Thanks for the pics.

big one!!

Nice write up. Congrats

A few months ago, I had read a thread somewhere about mulefoot hogs in Texas and the guy who posted it included an image. That prompted some reading on the breed and that was about it. I thought is was bizarre, but interesting.

Had I note seen the thread with the picture, I don't think I would have noticed this guy's feet. In fact, I kept looking at the bottom of his feet while taking pictures and thinking something wasn't right and then it dawned on me that he wasn't cloven.

The pics above are of the front feet. The rear feet are mulefooted as well, but the top of the hooves show a cleft where the toes should be separate, but the bottom is solid (see below).

Everything in regard to tracking sort of fell into place when we realized we had not been looking for the correct tracks, LOL.

Cool. I almost bought a Pulsar listed in the classifieds but the deal on my bow worked out so although the pulsar posted was a great deal you can only spend it once.

Pigs just east of Rosston have been scarce. I know they are there but haven't seen them while deer hunting like last year. I could have popped one almost every time I hunted last year. Not so this year.

Great story. Cool hog.

Thats neat , I've never seen that before

Atta boy! Keep up the good work!

We've killed several mule-footed hogs in the last year...mainly in the Buffalo/Oakwood area. We rarely see them elsewhere.

i was told the mule hooved hog is a decendant from the earliest hogs brought to the America's by the early Spanish Explorers,,,,Like Desoto and Christopher Columbus, etc.,. They brought hogs on the ships from Spain and dropped them off at different coastal locations for future explorers to have a food source. Ga Coastal area and other Southeastern State islands still have mule hooved hogs today.

I have been told that there are a few mule hoof pigs around these parts in East Texas. Haven't run across any though. Neat

I mentioned the early Spanish possibility above. What I am finding is that for North American mulefoots, the breed developed in the 1800s from crossbreading Spanish hogs and other varieties such as Berkshire and Poland China. So while mulefoots may have Spanish ancestry, they have ancestry from other places as well. Suffice it to say that their actual ancestry isn't well understood at this time, not even by the breeders who raise them.