The Michell family worked hard for two months last fall to plant fields of oats on their 150-acre farm in northeast Georgia. Then, over the winter, a big family of wild hogs — also known as a sounder — showed up and started rooting around the newly planted fields.
Joe Mitchell, 24, tells Outdoor Life they’d known there were some wild pigs around, and they’d been shooting any hogs they spotted.
“They’d come and go,” Mitchell says, “until a huge group of them descended on our oat fields and we had to do something about them. They were really getting out of hand.”
Joe’s father, Alan, knew that the only surefire way to eliminate the hogs was to trap the whole sounder. This fits with the current consensus among land managers, as repeated studies show that hunting individual hogs is ineffective and can actually make the problem worse. Trapping, on the other hand, “is the number-one way to effectively eliminate feral hogs,” according to several experts and at least one wildlife biologist based in Missouri.
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Joe says that with this plan in mind, they started asking neighbors and friends if they knew any local trappers.
“We learned that Preston Chandler, a neighbor, had a hog trap and knew how to use it,” says Joe, who works full-time on the family farm in Martin. “Preston came and looked at the problem, and we started baiting a spot where we set up his Pig Brig net.”
After baiting the center of the trap with corn, they spread the circular net around the bait using eight durable posts. The net, made of heavy-duty mesh, was attached to the posts at ground level, while around the perimeter there were several places where the net was pulled up off the ground, allowing hogs to pass through easily. Chandler then monitored the trap with trail cams as the hogs grew accustomed to entering and exiting the netted area.
“We baited the spot for a few weeks,” Joe explains. “And once we had lots of hogs coming to the trap every night and getting comfortable inside the net, we closed the net spots where they were coming in, which then sets the trap.”
With the Pig Brig net fully closed, hogs can still muscle their way underneath the net and enter the circle. But the net bottom extends for several feet inside the closure, which makes it impossible for the hogs to push their way back out. It’s the same basic idea as a fish trap.
“It’s a simple and pretty ingenious system for trapping hogs, and it sure worked for us.”
Within just 24 hours of the trap being set, Joe says, they had the entire group of pigs corralled inside.
“There were five us, all armed,” Joe says. “And when we showed up, the pigs inside the net trap went absolutely wild. They were running around and leaping into the net but they couldn’t get out.”
He says the sounder was made up of sows and piglets and a handful of giant boars. The largest four boars weighed around 250 pounds apiece.
“I don’t think another hog could have fit inside that trap.”
Joe says they shot all 41 pigs in the head, using mostly .22 caliber rifles. He was helped by his dad, Alan, along with Preston Chandler, his wife Fallon and friend Tim Cawthon. The Mitchells raise hogs on their operation, so they didn’t need any pork and gave all the meat away.
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There was another small sounder of wild hogs that had been rooting around the Mitchell’s farmland in recent months. But Joe says that since they trapped and removed the 41 pigs, the smaller sounder has disappeared.
“I don’t know where they went,” Joe says. “Maybe they got wind of what happed to the big sounder, and the smaller group headed somewhere safer than our farm.”
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