Hi all,
Yes, wild pigs are pretty much everywhere. Years ago I was married to a French Canadian & was invited on a wild hog hunt in Canada by some Canadian folks I met. Snow pigs I guess.
To paraphrase a country singer, I was hunting wild hogs before hunting hogs was cool. I have spent a lifetime hunting deer & wild hogs with buckshot & bullets I cast myself.
Ralph, I never got to know James as well as you but from the limited contact I had with him I know he was a true gentleman and an innovator of shotgun ammo. I know that the hunting & reloading world that was exposed to him truly regrets his passing.
Years ago, I experimented with loading two lead balls near bore size in my 10 ga. SXS. The two balls would land near each other (typically about 3 or 4 inches apart) at 60 yds. That load would likely take out most any dangerous game animal but I never used it on game as it was not practical for most of my hunting. Boca, I envy your .308/ 12 ga. combo gun. I would love to have that gun. I would use the .308 on hogs as a first choice & load something like James's triball load in the shotgun barrel for up close & personal when things get a bit sticky, as our British friends might say. I once worked on a survey of a 28,000 acre WMA that was filthy with wild hogs. It was mostly under water & you were as likely to meet a beaver as a hog. You could hear them jarring with each other yards away but I never saw one while surveying. I talked to one of the Game wardens that had a really nice specimen mounted in the lodge. It was not a particularly big hog but it had about 4" tusks. I took a pic of it, maybe I will post it one day. The warden told me that they will normally avoid human contact but "they will run you if you surprise them".
I did quite a lot of patterning when I was younger. I would go shoot a couple patterns before it got dark after work at least 2 or three times a week & that went on for a number of years. I also patterned duck loads but buckshot comprised a large percentage. There are a number of things I have come to believe. I had buckshot patterns from my 10 ga. that would place almost all of a load of "OOO" buck close enough that you could cover them with one hand at 60 yds. There are a number of reasons buckshot is not effective at extended range. First, it rapidly looses velocity & energy. Next, the main advantage of any multi-pellet load is it produces a pattern so you can hit fast moving game. Trying to make a rifle out of it is defeating the purpose. The main advantage of loads like the triball is not so much that they extend range, but that they are effective on big, tough critters.
I don't know how many times I have seen even small hogs absorb numerous hits with buckshot without going down. Deer, yes, but I will never hunt hogs with buckshot as even "ooo" pellets lack the penetration needed. I hunted hogs & deer with a .30-30 loaded with cast bullets for a number of years. I was amazed at some of the instant kills I made & they were killing much faster than jacketed soft points. I was thinking, this shouldn't be happening, jacketed soft points should kill better. Then I figured out what was going on. The bullets were cast from hard wheel weight alloy & they were fracturing or blowing up so to speak. Not good, penetration would have been very badly compromised had they hit anything hard. Watch your alloy!
Well, tough game can be hard to take down with anything & even a .45-70 has failed to drop them in their tracks at times. The guy that said bullet placement trumps power knows what he was talking about but in the real world in heavy cover, shooting at a fast moving target in low light, that is easier said than done!
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Originally Posted by fivegunner
