Hogs. Will either use a Bergara Approach with a 20 inch barrel or a Fulton Arms M1A/14.

From a blind or just out on the trail the bolt.
Walking around between feeders waiting for them to drop corn the M1A

Speer Gold Dot. Affordable round that expands nicely.

Nosler 165gr

^^^
Nosler 165 Partition would be a very good option.

Oh and any 308 for a hog will do

From a blind

quote:

Originally posted by sasquatch28:
Speer Gold Dot. Affordable round that expands nicely.

I use Federal Fusion, which uses the same bonded soft point bullet technology as Speer Gold Dot rifle loads, just marketed towards hunting. (Federal and Speer are owned by the same company, and produced at the same plant.)

Works well on hogs.

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:
I use Federal Fusion ....

I have long been somewhat curious about feral hog hunting. What bullet weight, and how do the Fusion bullets perform? I.e., are they usually through and through? Have you ever recovered any?

I use 150 grain for the .308 loading. They expand nicely. Usually end up with a large exit wound out the opposite side.

We don't usually recover the bullets. Even among the ones without an exit wound because we're not concerned about fully harvesting the meat. Hogs are nuisance animals. Hog hunting is partly about getting some meat, but mostly about culling pests. The ones that I do harvest meat from usually just involve carving out the tenderloins and shoulders, and not bothering with the rest.


Most of my hog hunting isn't with .308. Where I typically hunt is overgrown timber plots, so there's no need to take shots at longer distance. Since nearly all shots are under 100 yards, I typically use 7.62x39, but occasionally bring out a .308 or .30-06. One of these days I'm going to give it a whirl with .30 Carbine.

I've also seen plenty of hogs killed with .223, .357 Magnum, .44 Magnum and .30-30. Along with a smattering of much less common calibers.

Thanks.
I have seen any number of videos about hog hunting, but most do not provide any information about specific loads or terminal effects other than what can be seen.

Even though I probably will never have the opportunity of doing it myself, ballistics of all sorts are of continuing interest to me.

If you are shooting one of the 99.99% of hogs that are 300 pounds or less, darn near any expanding bullet that isn’t a varmint grenade will work just fine.

You want it to expand to maximize wounding potential - a non-expanding bullet isn’t much less likely to kill an animal, but is a LOT more likely to kill it slowly after it has run far enough away that you’ll never find it.

You don’t want a bullet that is designed to instantly break apart, because even though most hogs aren’t big, tough animals, you still want enough penetration to reliably hit vital organs.

This is pretty much the definition of a “medium game” round.

If you run into a one-in-a-million 1000 pound hogzilla, you might rather have something edging towards a “large game” load. This would typically be a heavy-for-caliber (slower, higher SD bullets penetrate farther) tough, controlled-expansion (again, so the bullet doesn’t open up TOO much or shed too much mass, again so it penetrates farther) bullet.

A 1000 pound hog still isn’t a rhinoceros, and a good hunter who can pick his shot could certainly kill one with pretty much any .308 load. It’s just a situation where a heavier bullet gives you more margin for error and lets you take less-than-ideal shots.

E.g., if a 1000 pound hog (or even a 500 pound one) is angled away from you and that’s the only shot you’ve got before it heads off into the brush, the bullet has to go through a lot of hog long-ways to get to the heart and lungs. If the bullet just makes it to the guts, sure, the pig is going to die, but unless you get lucky and hit one of the couple of major blood vessels, it might take hours, maybe a lot of hours.

Basically, a heavier, better-constructed bullet makes less-than-ideal shots less less-than-ideal.

It’s kind of an exaggerated example of the same idea, but I’ve killed several deer with light varmint loads out of a .222. That is a really terrible round for deer, but every deer I shot with it was a one-shot, dead-right-there, ethical shot, because I waited for perfect shots at close range or I didn’t shoot.

If I’d run into a trophy buck and had even what would normally be a slam-dunk easy shot (say, broadside at 150 yards), I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger. The little varmint bullets just don’t have enough penetration for even a “perfect” heart-lung shot.

So why not always use heavy, tough bullets? You basically are trading less wound-per-inch-of-penetration for more inches of penetration. If you don’t need the extra inches (because given the animal and the snot, the bullet is probably going to go out the other side), a lighter bullet that expands faster/more will do more damage and is likely to kill the animal more quickly and humanely.

It’s all tradeoffs, and it’s mostly not as big a deal as I make it out to be, and I think the vast majority of hunters just pick any decent hunting bullet, don’t take shots with “bad” angles (or do, if they’re not very concerned with hunting ethics), and then don’t think about it any further than that. But there’s a bit of a rabbit hole you can go down if you want to.

Thanks. I have a bunch of 168 TSX hand loads that I used to use for mulies and elk and was wondering if they were too much for hogs

My rifle likes the Hornady 165gr Full Boar which uses the proven GMX bullet. The problem is that I haven’t seen it available anywhere in a few years.

Remington used to make a 308 Hog Hammer ammo. IIRC uesd a 168 gn Barnes TSX bullet. Seemed to work well out of an AR-10 for my friend.

Barnes. Either TTSX or TSX but, I'm in California and can only hunt lead free. Still, I've used those bullets to good effect in other places including Africa. With solid results.