Thank you for the reply. Its kinda sad because the meat from the slaughtered hogs could have been used to feed the hungry.
Prions are bad news. You cannot remove prions with ordinary cooking.
I remember reading some breathless articles about feral pigs in Saskatchewan last year. Along the lines of: Ryan Brook predicts that within his lifetime, Saskatchewan will be home to more wild pigs than people.
Should I have said prions are bad, bad, bad news?
Boars were used quite effectively in the novel “Hannibal”.
Yeah, I wouldn’t come within a hundred yards of one.
Some lady was killed by a rampage* of pigs in a subdivision last year. Somewhere in Texas.
*Not sure what a group of pigs are called.
Google sez it’s: A sounder of swine
Or: A passel of pigs
This site provides the following information for our porcine pals when it comes to group names for animals:
| Name | Group Name |
|---|---|
| Pigs (General) | Drift, Drove |
| Pigs (Boars) | Singular, Sounder |
| Pigs (Hogs) | Team, Passel, Drift, Parcel |
| Pigs (Piglets) | Litter, Farrow |
| Pigs (Swine) | Sounder |
Boars can be either male domestic pigs or can refer to both male and female wild pigs. Hogs and swine are apparently interchangeable. I think. And there’s a ton of names that differentiate based on size and maturity. Feral pigs is just pigs and never boars (unless they’re male). Overall, they’re all pigs. Ain’t English wonderful?
Maybe the feral hogs(razorbacks? 
) in Arkansas are nastier than their Texas cousins, but here’s what TPWD says:
### Is the meat good to eat?
Yes, meat from feral hogs is extremely tasty and much leaner than penraised pork. The meat from older boars may be tougher and rank tasting if not prepared adequately. As with all pork, care should be taken and the meat well cooked. Otherwise, it should be prepared just like market hogs. The slower the meat is cooked, the more tender and tasty it becomes.
And up in Missouri it seems to be safe too:
The recently passed state budget bill that is on its way to Gov. Mike Parson includes an expansion of the Share the Harvest Program, which will allow hunters to donate feral hogs in addition to deer to local food banks.
I’d heard something similar. A little more googlage reveals:
https://answers.fieldandstream.com/forum/hunting/big-game-hunting/22330-how-does-wild-boar-taste
Meanwhile, in Spain, they feed one breed of them acorns:
I don’t know about those places. I promise you if you were to see the feral hogs around here you would not think, Mmm…yummy ham.
I have seen them close up. Alive and dead. Not pleasant.
I doubt sincerely that the Iberico pigs in Spain are feral beasties. Perhaps feral pigs can be found waaaaaay back in their ancestry. But Iberico is such a premium product, those pigs are carefully bred, selected, fed premium acorn mash, and then gently slaughtered.
Kinda like comparing the Japanese Wagyu cows to the free range bison which are trampling tourists in Wyoming.
If you are flat-out starving, go ahead: shoot a feral pig, skin and gut it through several changes of welder gloves, pick out all the worms, and soak the meat for a few weeks in a salt and bleach brine.
Yum, yum!
~VOW
(Edited to add: the Field and Stream articles are from 2011. There could indeed be some nasty stuff that has spread throughout the feral pig population. The population has grown immensely, from what I understand. A too-large population is vulnerable to disease and infestation.)
Talk about an oxymoron!
I believe the preferred phrase is “lightly killed”.
“This is a twelve-storey block combining classical neo-Georgian features with all the advantages of modern design. The tenants arrive in the entrance hall here, are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort and past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these large containers–”
Didn’t @CairoCarol tell us about how she hired a guy to trap and kill her feral pigs? Not sure whether or not they were eaten.
I’m having some of one for dinner tonight that we shot down in Texas.
I read this too damned fast the first time, and was hearing Hannibal Lector at the end of Silence of the Lambs. Didn’t know the SDMB had active cannibals on it!
Generally speaking lean pork is an abomination. Feral pork is fine. -ish. But I can confirm I’ve had some boar sausage that was pretty damn gamey.
I’ll take properly raised Berkshire pork with a nice fat layer any day.