Story by Tom Claycomb III

After watching an instructional YouTube video Justin Biddle, Vice Presdent of Marketing for Umarex USA sent to TOJ’s Bill Olson and me, we got to talking.  In one of the videos Umarex USA air gun ProStaffer Chris Cook (cafesandcampfires.com) demonstrated a few some variations of his hog baiting techniques.

Cook is hunting hogs with a small caliber air gun, so he wants to get a head shot, and that means the hog needs to be positioned to be facing him. Here are some points made. If you dump a bag of corn in a small area or even scatter it the hogs will be rough housing at the dinner table. About the second you’re to take a head shot another one will come up and root him out of the way.  The small target area is constantly moving.

He pulls out a few tricks from his hat to ensure a stationary head-on shot that can be effective with smaller .22 or .25 caliber Umarex air rifles.  He begins by digging a small hole with a regular hand-held posthole digger about 12 inches deep.  Two double handfuls of corn are then thrown in the hole followed by liberally squirted some hog oil scent on top.  Two more double handfuls of corn, hog oil, two more handfuls and more hog oil. The top of the corn and hog oil layers is about six to eight inches below the surface.

This set up is akin to a trapper positioning how a critter’s approach is “funneled” to a trap set or trying to position an animal to show when calling plus stopping an animal in the best position. With this set-up, the hog will hit the scene and stick his snout down into the hole to eat.  By design this means the hogs scent detecting abilities will be nullifying, plus it has the porker’s eye looking down thus affording a fairly-still target.  A small handful of corn is scattered around the holes to attract the swine to the hole.

To make sure the hog is eating on the far side of the hole, and facing the blind head on, he lays some sticks on the front and both sides in a blocked C-shape. It surprised me but he said a hog doesn’t want to be standing on the sticks so it will approach from the open side. And he doesn’t lay big sticks — most looked like maybe one and a half inches thick.

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