135 lb. Boar Wipeout - Thermal Hunt

[Double Naught Spy]

http://youtu.be/qF8num6K8I4

Worked at TBR yesterday where I help out with hog and predator control for a buddy.. My regular stand had developed wood rot in the floor. I had left my previous hunt early when I heard the floor cracking. Had I stayed much longer, I would have been dumped on the ground. So we hooked up that stand to the tractor and carried it back to the shop for repairs. In the mean time, an old wooden stand is taking its place and I used it to hunt my normal spot.

The deer seemed to recognize that something was up, but as noted in the vid, maybe it was the boar that wasn't too far behind them.

The first shot caught the boar in the left shoulder, breaking it, and not over penetrating. The second shot was a bit high and missed. The third shot hit about dead center of the top of the spine and part of the bullet exited out between the front legs. In retrospect, this anchoring shot probably was not necessary, but he ran after the first shot and I wasn't having him get up to try it again, by golly!

The Armasight Zeus continues to perform well with my Grendel!

135 lb. Boar
85 yards
Armasight Zeus 3 640
6.5 Grendel using Hornady SST 123 gr.
UNV MDVR

[Slappy]

Love it, another fine video, thanks for posting. Seems the only hunting lately I get into is pictures from friends and videos like this!! The Curly Shuffle!! BANG BANG!!

[hydrotech]

Pretty cool! Thermal sights and night vision stuff are on my wish list. Do you constantly look through your scope when hunting at night and using the thermal sight? Seems like it would be hard to adjust from looking out in the dark to looking through a lighted scope.

[Double Naught Spy]

NO! Been there, done that, though. That is a chore and cumbersome and got old really fast. Very good question, BTW. It is best if you have some sort of spotter, be it NV or thermal regardless of whether you have NV or thermal on your gun. However, I only do my viewing through one eye and I leave the other eye night-adapted (I was going to say with night vision, but that would confuse the issue). That way, you keep one eye in good shape to see unaided.

[hydrotech]

So you usually have a buddy go with you that has NV goggles? .... and they just tell you when to look through your scope as they see the animals coming into view?

[Double Naught Spy]

Sorry, poor choice of words on my part. I said 'spotter' as an abbreviation for spotting scope.

[usmc1371]

Curly shuffle. Man I never get tired of you vids.

[hydrotech]

are you a fan of the head shots between the ear and the eye on hogs? I went to a friends ranch in Dilley texas, Frio county and we shot a lot of pigs. My friend told be not to shoot behind the shoulder because the anatomy is not the same as on a deer where you aim behind the shoulder and a tad low. He said shoot between the ear and the eye if they are broadside. I killed a few that way. never did try a shoulder shot.

[81police]

GREAT video Double Naught Spy!! Your videos make me want an ATN X-sight so I can film day AND night like you. You do really well putting these together. I'm surprised you haven't shot all the hogs in Montague county yet!

[Double Naught Spy]

I make a lot of CNS head shots on hogs. Here are some of my Grendel examples that I have on video...

https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=p9mN1XxqnCI

http://youtu.be/6txddnqz7gg

https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=wFnaAxuPHPo

https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=4qjN-fEiOLA

https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=m6y2dX6IpOw

https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=-LqjPNmhahs

I have several more taken with a .308 bolt gun you can find on my Youtube site and still from all my hunts on my Photobucket page (5.56, 6.5 Grendel, .308, and .45-70) that include head shots. They are great, but I only make them when I feel confident about the shot. Confidence is a broad generalization. If the hog is moving around too much, then I won't. If I am too excited, I won't. If I don't like the shot, I won't take it. Such shots require more precision. So when I can't make that shot, I go to the vitals. In all, about 30% of the hogs I shoot are proper head shots and a bunch more are CNS neck shots just behind the head.

People make a big deal about pig anatomy being different than deer anatomy. It is and it isn't. The organs are squished around and a little differently sized, but otherwise, the differences are getting too subtle for the accuracy of most shooters to make one iota of difference, especially if the hog/deer is in motion.

So based on what your friend said, you aim a behind the shoulder and a tad low? That is the sort of non-specific generalization that doesn't really account for anatomical differences sufficiently, though it should work fine. Is the hog absolutely broadside or quartered? If quartered, which way? Is the leg forward, straight down, or back? It all matters because it changes the location of the shoulder relative to the organs you are trying to hit if you are trying to hit specifically.

Technically, if you are shooting behind the shoulder and a tad low, you are not apt to hit the heart (which is why you shoot there) unless the hog is severely quartered away. The "shoulder" encompasses a very large group of muscles, along with the bones that they control. Chances are, you are making a low shoulder shot, but behind the upper end of the humerus, below the scapula, and above the elbow (low end of humerus). See where I am going with this? Generic terminology often isn't sufficient to accurately describe the subtleties of actual shot placement unless shot placement really doesn't need to be that subtle/specific.

Some folks will tell you to put a shot behind the ear. What does that mean? Is the head up or down? Is this a broadside or quartered shot? Behind the ear ends up being behind the entire skull if you move more than an inch back on most hogs. With their head down, behind the ear shots tend to be lower vertically and hence closer to the spinal column. With heads up, higher on the neck and further way from the spinal column. If shooting broadside behind the ear and hit high, you can get a pass thru like on this hog I killed that had an old bullet wound there. It was an old, not fully healed, but scarred and oozing through and through where the exit side was the side that was leaky.

https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=N73hReqkpmU

If behind the ear and quartered toward you, the shot may pass through neck and shoulder muscle outside of the rib cage and do no vitals damage. It may be a bad shot. Behind the ear and quartered away and the bullet's trajectory should take it into the back of the skull...a good shot.

Again, specificity of terms or descriptions is sort of critical when people talk about notions of shot placement because it isn't just placement, but trajectory and penetration.

So contrary to what a lot of the deer hunters say about hunting hogs, and even some of the hog hunters about hunting hogs, the same shots work on both given the generalities of descriptions of the anatomy and shots. The differences in organ size and arrangement is subtle, not dramatic. However, to make matters even worse, if you go online and look at deer and anatomy schematics that are available, some of them from vet or butcher sources, the placement of organs is shown to differ as much or more within pigs as compared to deer and vice versa.

Between the eye and ear is certainly good, if you can make the shot.

[hydrotech]

I only have had that one experience hog hunting and just took the advice I was given. I enjoyed reading your comments on shot placement. I am hoping to go back to Frio County Texas on my 2nd hog hunting trip around Christmas break. I gotta watch the vids now.

[hydrotech]

I like the vids!

[81police]

Great points Double Naught Spy! You could even take it further and factor in differences in elevation between the shooter and the pig, something that will change the placement of the bullet as well, if extreme enough. This way of thinking is what made the great elephant hunter W.D.M. Bell so successful. He studied anatomy, and knew where to adjust his shot placement depending on the angle or direction the head was facing. Same with pig anatomy. Great post I concur

[Double Naught Spy]

81police, yeah, everything comes into play. Yeah, say you are much higher than your target hog and it is quartered away from you and you want to make a vitals shot. Your shot placement will look terrible to anyone who doesn't know what shot you were making. That is because the shot is going the be high on the back and well back about mid body. It is going to look horrible, but that is the shot you would need from that angle (you and the target) to hit the vitals.

Maybe I am projecting some of my own naivete from back from when I was a new hunter, but I tended to think of hogs as 2D targets like the paper targets you practice with at the range and that just isn't how it works. Where the shot lands on the outside of the body only matters relative to where the shot is going inside the body and how far.

Unfortunately, I have lost some hogs because I flubbed the shots. So I like to get a good look at what my shots did when I am successful to figure out what works and why.

Hog before last, I killed with an elbow shot. It was a bad shot. I was higher than the hog and the round hit the elbow and the hog died. It was weird. We fully expected the shot to have exited the elbow on the inside and to have entered the chest cavity, but there was no exit wound. So we butchered the hog. Turns out the shot hit just above the elbow, breaking the humerus, but deflecting the shot significant such that it traveled up the arm and into the chest cavity, coming apart all the while, doing lots of damage and blowing out the heart. It should not have worked that way, but it did. Sorry there is no video because I screwed that up as well, but we did get pics of cutting open the hog.

You can learn a lot by taking hogs apart and figuring out what your bullets are doing inside them. I learned I got really lucky.

[montana]

Great video , your third shot was perfect, ended it instantly. Thanks again for posting your hunting vids, I always look forward to them