“I quickly found that hunting in the daytime, the traditional way, I wasn’t very effective… I saw how effective thermal technology was in combat, and from what I see, farmers and ranchers are at war with feral hogs in the United States. So, it just made common sense to me,” said Rod.
Wow, this is cool. What do you get when you combine a combat veteran, thermal night vision equipment, military grade weapons, and cutting edge hunting methods for guided pig hunts? You get one hell of a hog eradication service, and that is what this country needs right now.
Enter Jager Pro Thermal Hog Control out of Columbus, Georgia. This company is not only brutally efficient in eradicating these things, but they are also in the business of taking folks out on guided night hunts to turn a profit. Just imagine if Jager Pro became a franchise and these guys were able to take this concept to the next level? (they do day hunts as well)
Feral hogs are a huge problem and I have talked about this in the past. Even here in Idaho there are sightings of feral pigs in the south and this state’s game officials are concerned about their possible growth here. In Texas and the rest of the south, they are really bad and it is an all out war to eradicate these things. The amount of damage to crops and land they do is costing millions and the reproduction rates of pig are worse than rabbits. It is often referred to as the ‘Pig Bomb’.
The other thing that jumped out at me was the concept of the ‘Judas Pig’. Basically this is a strategy derived from a method of eradicating goats in Hawaii back in the eighties. The way it works is they strap a locator beacon on a pig and let them loose in an area. Because these animals are social, they tend to look for their fellow pigs or goats and graze or mate with them. If hunters want to find their prey, they just follow the Judas Pig (usually a young female pig or gilt) and then kill her new found buddies. It is a method that is being employed all over the world with excellent success.
Does this sound familiar guys and gals? Pseudo-operations is what this is, and this is a very simplistic example of how effective it can be when applied to hog hunting. The trick for warfare is finding that pseudo operator (s) that will lead you to the enemy–either willingly or unwillingly. Which is an interesting question? I wonder if any Judas Pigs figured out that they were causing so much death and purposely avoided contact with other pigs? hmmm.
I was thinking what would be really cool for this deal was to combine the Judas Pig concept with a geo-locating mobile app for smart phones. That way hunters could participate in following the various Judas Pigs that have been released into the wild, all by pulling out a smart phone and seeing what lights up on their GPS enabled map. Jager Pro could offer this app to customers on a subscription basis, or use some other method of monetizing the thing. Each Jager Pro pin on the map could have different types of information, like if it was a female or male, or how many pigs have been eradicated by using this pig. It would be one way of making it easier for hunters to do their thing out there, and quicken the eradication process.
Also, in Texas I am told that you can sell wild pig meat. But the animal has to be alive when you sell it. They want to test the pig for diseases and whatnot before slaughtering it and selling the meat. But still, that would be one way of making a little coin off of this deal. Very innovative, and Rod Pinkston of Jager Pro definitely gets a thumbs up from FJ. –Matt
Link to Jager Pro website here.
Facebook for Jager Pro here.
The War On Wild Hogs Using Military Tactics
Using thermal-imaging technology to put the crosshairs on feral hogs.
By Drew Hall
June 2008
It’s 0100 hours and pitch-black dark as my team and I await our target’s arrival. We’d been briefed just hours before of the mass amount of damage our targets have caused. These beasts have destroyed other’s means of life, they’ve taken hard-earned crops away from farmers and they’ve had little to no regret about any of it. At least, not until tonight. For most of them, tonight will be the end. And for those who survive the assault, they won’t be returning to this area any more.
We lay in silence — waiting. Our team leader whispers the targets should be arriving any minute, their nightly routine rarely changes much. Little did they know, their own routine would be the death of them. They spend the heat of the day hiding in the swamps and thick woods, then they leave the safety of the swamps to devastate the land around them.
Suddenly, we spot a group of targets at more than a half-mile away. Our thermal-imagery optics allow us to view the presence of heat at extreme distances. We decide to start the stalk instead of waiting them out. We need to complete the mission quickly; we don’t have time to wait. After an hour-long stalk in a tactical formation, we are within 50 yards of our targets which have no idea anything is amiss. We spread out in kneeling and prone positions and take aim. The first shot rings out as muzzle fire exits our leader’s rifle. A barrage of rifle fire follows as all but a few of the targets fall to the ground. Some manage to escape, but the chain of command has been broken, and they won’t return.
This might sound like an exerpt from a military novel, but it is really what a tactical hog hunt with Rod Pinkston of Jager Pro Tactical Boar Hunting of Columbus is like. Except, you’ll be carried to your mission location in a Mossy Oak camouflaged E-Z-GO cart instead of having to belly crawl in sand for miles.
Rod’s military background begins and ends in the Army where he began 24 years ago and will retire in August at the rank of master sergeant. Although not officially retired yet, Rod spends most of his free time scouting and guiding as the owner of Jager Pro Tactical Boar Hunting. He is currently the non-commissioned officer in charge of the United States Army Marksmanship Unit’s Olympic Shotgun Team at Fort Benning. He is also a senior field editor with Boar Hunter magazine and has helped the Auburn University School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences with wild-hog research. Rod also attained the “Jagdschein” (European hunting license) to hunt European boars while deployed overseas. Rod said the license is extremely hard for non-European citizens to attain, and it took several years of tests and field training to finally receive it.
He decided to start his guide service after years of military-combat experience, and hog hunting combined with that experience gave him the idea for the ultimate hog-hunting success story. Rod said the name for his company came from his time spent in Germany studying with the several “Jagers,” which means “hunter” in German.
Rod didn’t always plan on starting a guided-hunt company and originally just wanted to be a feral-hog control agent. He said he found that farmers don’t want to pay someone to come kill hogs, and after not being as successful as he wanted in the daytime, he thought of a better way to hog hunt.
“I quickly found that hunting in the daytime, the traditional way, I wasn’t very effective… I saw how effective thermal technology was in combat, and from what I see, farmers and ranchers are at war with feral hogs in the United States. So, it just made common sense to me,” said Rod.
He began the guided-hunt company last year as a means of paying for the very expensive costs of furnishing thermal-imaging optics for his clients. After his retirement, Rod plans to offer more hunts and pursue guiding on a full-time basis.
He said he started with a light on top of a scope then transitioned to generation-3, night-vision technology. Now he has upgraded to thermal-technology optics. Rod said the spotlighting technique works well until the hogs have been shot at once; then they learn to associate the light with danger and quickly make themselves scarce after seeing any source of light. After moving up to the night-vision optics, Rod said it made a huge difference in his success rate, but the optics are still limited in comparison to thermal imagery. The night-vision optics require some sort of ambient light, such as the moon, and when you get into thick vegetation, your vision can be limited, he said. That’s when Rod decided to step up to the thermal scopes. Thermal scopes don’t rely on light at all, making them easy to use from dusk until dawn. The scopes show terrain and other things in a light-gray color and all living objects show up bright white because of their thermal signature (body heat). On the night of my hunt, it was easy to see groups of deer as far as 1,000 yards away, and some even ventured as close as 50 yards without ever knowing we were there as we waited for a group of hogs.
“The long-range spotting scope is rated at 3/4 of a mile, and I can tell the difference between hogs, deer and coyotes at a half-mile. The scopes on the rifles are rated at 500 to 600 yards,” said Rod.
Even at such long distances, different species have separate mannerisms that make them easily distinguishable. The deer look almost like goats at long distances but are easy to distinguish from hogs because of their long necks. Rod said hogs look a lot like an armadillo at long distances. Coyotes trot and jump around like a dog would, and you won’t see a coyote grazing or rooting like deer and hogs.
Rod said after several years of night hunting for hogs, he’s learned quite a few things about their behavior. While some game and fish are affected by the moon phases, he said he doesn’t think hogs are affected in any way.
“I kept track of moon phases and when I would see hogs and when the most were killed. I don’t think it has anything at all to do with the moon phases. I think hogs are intelligent enough to know it has more to do with hunting pressure and time of year,” he said.
He said the hotter the weather is, generally, the later in the night the hogs start to move. During the beginning of the summer the sows and smaller groups will start to move as soon as it gets dark, and the mature boars will start to move around midnight. As the weather gets hotter, both the sows’ and boars’ movements will move later into the night. Rod said their behavior and movement periods are very predictable during the summer nights.
“You can almost set your watch to it. I hunted the same place, the same tree, for three nights in a row and killed 44 hogs in those three nights. All three nights the first hog came down the trail between 11:30 and midnight,” he said.
Rod only offers hunts from the end of January until October because he doesn’t want to confuse any DNR law-enforcement officers about shots occurring after dark. He doesn’t offer hunts during deer season so his activities won’t be confused with poachers spotlighting deer.
Some people might question the legalities of hunting hogs at night, but everything Rod does while hunting hogs at night is perfectly legal. The Georgia hunting regulations state that a special permit is only needed when hunting hogs from a vehicle, over bait or while using a light of more than six volts, none of which occur while hunting with Rod. The only thing anyone needs to hunt hogs with Jager Pro is a Georgia hunting license.
Rod said people ask him all the time why he doesn’t like hogs so much and his response is always, “If you scooped as much hog manure as I did for the first 18 years of my life, growing up on that hog farm, it’s kind of therapeutic for me.” He made the comment jokingly assuring me he has no personal vendetta against hogs. Even with the large quantities of hogs taken during his hunts, it would still be almost impossible to ever eradicate hogs in Georgia. Females become sexually mature at six months and have a gestation period of only 115 days — meaning adult sows average two litters of young per year. With up to 14 young per litter, and basically no natural predators after the age of six months, the hogs are still reproducing faster than they are being harvested.
Since Rod is doing farmers and landowners a service by harvesting nuisance hogs on their land, he asks that every hog be taken, not just the mature boars or sows. He explained that if he doesn’t harvest the 3-month-old gilt (young female hog) now, in three more months it will be sexually active and producing offspring. Therefore, in order to successfully eliminate hogs from one particular area for an extended period of time, all of the hogs, not just the mature animals, must be taken. And if anyone is actually worried the heavy hunting pressure could ever eradicate hogs completely, Rod doesn’t hunt hogs during deer season, giving the animals a pretty long recovery period.
Daytime Hunting and the “Judas Pig”
Rod has become well known for finding hogs and being very successful during nighttime hunts, but a lot of hunters in other states can’t hunt hogs at night. And most people in Georgia can’t afford to outfit their rifles with $11,000 scopes. So, Rod has now developed a solution to finding hogs in the daytime, and using their own four-legged friends against them.
“I get a dozen phone calls every month from hunters [in other states] asking me to help them be more efficient finding hogs in the daytime,” said Rod.
Rod calls his method the “Judas Pig” method because it literally turns one pig against the rest of its species. The method begins with the trapping of a large group of hogs. Rod recommends using five to six large livestock panels and some sort of door that allows hogs in, but won’t allow them out. He said hunters, now trappers, should leave the door open for an extended period of time, which allows the hogs to get used to feeding in the large area inside the trap. When they’ve grown accustomed to feeding in the area, then you start using the door. Rod said the method works exceptionally well when more than one group of hogs are using an area.
“If one group of hogs is feeding earlier in the night and gets into the trap, when the next group comes they think ‘Hey, those hogs are eating my food,’ then they go into the trap as well,” said Rod.
The next step to turning the hogs in the trap against their species is simple. Rod has designed a radio-telemetry ear tag especially for hogs which allows hunters to track the tag once the hog has been released. The technology works the same as most dog-tracking collars, and can usually be programmed to a frequency to work with equipment hunters might already have for tracking dogs. But, the reason the technique is called the “Judas Pig” method is because you should kill all the hogs but the youngest gilt, which you tag with the telemetry ear tag. Rod said the youngest gilts are so group oriented they will find another group of hogs as soon as possible.
“Turn her loose, and within a matter of hours she will find the closest group,” said Rod.
Then the next time you are hunting in the area, you know exactly where the group of hogs is. The ear tag will last up to one year on its battery. Rod said the ear tag works well for dog hunters and even groups of traditional hunters.
“When those hogs are bedded up, now you know exactly where they are at. You can put some hunters on one side of the hogs and let the hogs smell someone on the other side to run them toward the group. Now, you’re in control of the strategy you need to use, and you know where the hogs are at,” he said.
Rod said to let the tagged gilt get away every time you hunt a particular group so you won’t have to trap another gilt to tag if you harvest the tagged one.
“She’ll just keep finding them — just like a paid informant,” he said.
Rod’s equipment is available through his company Jager Pro and a special one-way hog trap door, described in the article, will also soon be available at farm-equipment stores. All of the equipment is also marketed under the Jager Pro name.
Story here.
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Company Overview:
JAGER PRO™ is the only outfitter in the United States who guides hunters at night using military grade thermal technology and semi-automatic 308 rifles to perform thermal hog control in southwest Georgia. There is NO LIMIT on the number of hogs killed per night during these hog control missions. All pork is processed for hunters or donated to churches and local families. Open hunt dates are available under “Book Your Hunt” on the website calendar. Come enjoy the most exciting tactical boar hunt of your life!
The owner of JAGER PRO™ Hog Control Systems earned his living as a Soldier for 24 years. He retired as NCOIC of the United States Army Marksmanship Unit’s Olympic Shooting Team at Fort Benning, Georgia after his Soldiers won two gold medals at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China. He is also a Senior Field Editor with Boar Hunter Magazine, a member of the National Wildlife Control Operators Association and earned the coveted Jagdschein hunting European boars in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. The guides at JAGER PRO™ are retired U.S. Army Soldiers with 65 years of military experience and training.
Mission:
JAGER PRO™, LLC was established in May of 2006 to help reduce the economic and environmental damage caused by wild hogs in the state of Georgia. Our mission is to provide farmers and plantation owners with innovative wild hog management through the implementation of high-tech night vision and thermal equipment. We accomplish this mission by offering hunting clients the ultimate tactical boar hunting experience and adventure. We apply our military experience and thermal technology to wild hog management to be the premier outfitter and hog control operator in the state of Georgia.
Link to Jaeger Pro website here.
Facebook for Jager Pro here.