Feral Pig Ribs: Better Than Store Bought

 A tornado blew through Wilkinson County a few days ago and knocked out an electrical substation. Woodville, the county seat, and my family's home on Lake Mary lost power for several days.

Our butchered hog lay cut up and packaged in our refrigerator when we lost power, and I had a harrowing thought about what that hog would smell like when it thawed out if we didn't find a way to keep it from unfreezing,

Kim and I loaded all the pig meat into ice chests, iced it down, and distributed it among various family members living in Baton Rouge. 

As we parceled the meat, I came across the ribs, which had been packaged in four freezer bags and were still frozen. Let's cook 'em!

Under normal circumstances, we would have slow-smoked the ribs in our electric smoker. However, our smoker was in Mississippi, where the power was out, so we elected to cook them in our kitchen oven in Baton Rouge. 

Here's our extemporaneous recipe:

• First, we marinated the ribs for about an hour in Italian salad dressing. Then, we removed them from the marinade and applied a dry rub of salt, black pepper, cajan pepper, and garlic powder.

• Next, we prepared a glaze of honey, a little whiskey, butter, wine vinegar, and barbecue sauce.

• After we slathered the glaze on both sides of the ribs, we wrapped each rack in a double layer of heavy foil, put the packaged ribs in a shallow baking pan, and popped them into a preheated oven, taking care to place them with their fatty sides up.

• We cooked the ribs at 350 degrees for two and a half hours. Then, we unwrapped them, applied more glaze, and broiled the uncovered ribs for five minutes to make the glaze crunchy.

We ate the ribs with Bush's baked beans, which we supercharged with bacon and onions. The ribs paired nicely with a Stella Artis beer.

Our first attempt at cooking feral hog ribs was a success. They tasted better than the pork ribs I buy at the grocery store.

As you can see, we cooked our hog ribs using a scratch recipe. To achieve a similar result, you can use your favorite marinade and grocery store barbecue sauce. 

 Indeed, If you've ever cooked store-bought ribs, you can cook wild pig ribs the same way, and they will taste just as good. As my friends assured me after my family butchering our first feral hog. wild pigs taste delicious if you don't try to eat a big boar.

Feral Hog and Rutabaga Stew: It Tastes Better Than It Sounds

I wrote a while back that two young family members shot a wild hog at our Mississippi home, a sure sign that I am now living off the grid. 

The menfolk field-dressed the hog on the driveway and disposed of the guts at a top-secret location as a peace offering to the turkey vultures. The next morning, the entire family cut the meat into big chunks and put the harvest in the freezer.

Now what? Can we really eat this porcine trespasser?

My brother-in-law sent me The Hog Book by Jesse Griffiths. This encyclopedic volume is the definitive guide to hunting, killing, butchering, and eating feral pigs. 

In The Hog Book’s opening pages, Griffiths confidently asserts that all wild pigs are edible and some are delicious. 

Can that be true?  How can an animal so ugly and foul-smelling be good to eat? 

However, I have several friends who have killed and eaten feral hogs. They assure me that the small wild piggies are pretty tasty, although large boars should be avoided.

Our family’s chief outdoorsman, Charlie, prepared the family’s first wild pig meal: Feral Hog and Rutabaga Stew. I ate two helpings and pronounced it excellent.

Here’s the recipe:

• Season a pork shoulder with salt, pepper, and Tony Chachere’s seasoning. Brown the meat in a large saucepan with a bit of cooking oil.

• While the meat is browning, cut up an onion, two bell peppers, a large head of celery, and two rutabagas. The rutabagas should be sliced into one-inch cubes.

• Place the cut vegetables in the saucepan with the browned pork shoulder. Add two cups of beef stock. 

• Cover the saucepan with a lid and simmer the meat and vegetables over low heat for three hours or until the pork is tender enough to be pulled into large shreds with a fork.

Why the rutabagas? Unlike potatoes, rutabagas will stay firm through three hours of cooking. Also, rutabagas add a sweet taste to the stew and diminish the gamey taste of wild hog meat.

I have long been intrigued by the idea of shooting and eating a wild pig. After all, there are millions of feral swine in the rural South, and they’re all edible.

When the Apocalypse descends on America, as it indeed will, I'm comforted in the knowledge that I am surrounded by pork chops on the hoof. My family can eat humanely raised, locally sourced, hormone-free, wild-caught meat during lean times, while my ill-prepared urban neighbors will be forced to survive on ramen noodles and freeze-dried tofu.

Wild Pigs Divert My Attention from LSU's Disastrous Loss to Texas A&M

It’s Saturday evening at Lake Mary, Mississippi, and my family has congregated around our big-screen TV to watch LSU play Texas A&M in College Station. It’s a big game: LSU is ranked Number 8 in the national polls, and the Aggies are rated Number 14. Neither team has lost a Southeast Conference game.

I am filled with a sense of well-being. Loved ones are gathered around me. Cold beer is in the refrigerator, and we have plenty of game-time snacks. I adjust my Lazy Boy recliner to a comfortable semi-prone position.

All goes well in the first half, and LSU shows good prospects of beating the insufferable Aggies. Then, my team falls apart. Three interceptions and three missed field goals attest to a Tiger meltdown. I prepare myself for a major case of the weekend blues. We’re running out of beer.

Then providence intervenes. The game camera affixed to a pecan tree alerts us to two feral hogs rooting about in our three-acre front yard. All distress about the ballgame vanishes, and two family members break out their rifles from our gun safe. Armed with a 30.06 and a 30-30, they creep down to my home’s ground level and start shooting.

Both pigs squeal and head for the brush. The smaller hog is mortally wounded but manages to travel about 50 yards before succumbing to her wounds. Two generations of family members with flashlights follow the blood trail and find the interloper. She is stone dead.

What to do with a dead feral hog? Family members truss it up to one of the steel girders that keep our living quarters above the annual spring flood waters. Then they field dress the pig, dividing it into hams, ribs, pork shoulders, and backstrap. 

The hog slayers ice down the meat in a large ice chest and call it a night. We learn that LSU lost to A &M by a score of 38-23, but nobody cares.

The next morning, I propose we take all the hog meat to a nearby game processing plant and turn it into pork chops, sausage, and dinner-size pork loins. I offer to foot the bill.

We vote, and everyone except me opts to process the hog on our kitchen counter. By two in the afternoon, our feral hog is parceled and tucked away in the freezer--about a hundred pounds of meat.

Feral hogs are a major nuisance in the rural South, where they tear up the landscape and destroy crops. People are allowed to hunt them year-around by day or night. 

Everyone I know who has eaten wild-pig meat tells me that the small porkers are delicious. Thus, I ended my weekend feeling good about my family's contribution to feral hog control. And I'm looking forward to eating a pig harvested in my own front yard.

Who cares who won the LSU-Texas A&M game?

Wild Pigs and Lazy Tenured Professors: Very Difficult to Trap or Eradicate

Texas is infested with feral hogs—2.5 million of them, according to a recent New York Times story. In some parts of Texas, wild pigs outnumber people. And they can show up when you least expect them. A few years ago, a captured hog escaped from a trailer and plowed through a Whataburger restaurant.

These pigs are nasty creatures. They dig up crops, destroy fences, and drive out more desirable wildlife. They can be big—400 pounds or more; and they can be dangerous. If you corner a feral hog or get between a sow and her piglets, you can get hurt.

Unfortunately, feral pigs are very hard to eradicate. They are nocturnal animals seldom seen during daylight hours. They are extremely wily and quite suspicious of baited traps.  Texas passed legislation permitting people to hunt them at night and even to shoot them from helicopters; but so far the pig population just keeps growing larger. 

The more I learn about feral hogs the more struck I am by the similarities between wild pigs and the unproductive tenured professors who prowl our nation’s university campuses. Like feral

hogs, unproductive tenured professors are generally reclusive creatures who are seldom seen. Nevertheless, although they shun human contact, lazy professors, like wild pigs, can be dangerous if confronted or cornered. And, very much like feral hogs, lazy tenured professors do pretty much whatever they please. Like wild pigs, they snuff along from one academic year to the next, skulking through the academic underbrush and doing the minimum amount of work required to avoid post-tenure review.

It is time for the higher education community to confront the lazy tenured professor--the academic equivalent of a wild Texas hog. It is not fair for America’s college students to take out student loans for their education while universities harbor slothful professors who avoid students, don’t publish, and do little productive work. Anyone who has taught in a public university knows that the unproductive faculty member—protected by tenure—is a serious problem that academia as a whole is afraid to face.

Perhaps higher education could take some lessons from the feral hog experts—who are doing their best to reduce the population of wild pigs. First, the experts say, communities have to admit they have a problem. As Brett Johnson, an urban biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, noted a few years ago, some towns refuse to acknowledge they have a problem with feral hogs and are “sweeping it under the rug.” That is a mistake, Johnson said. “Once [feral hogs] get a foothold, the chance of getting control of the problem becomes really difficult,”

Second, the feral hog experts stress, it is important for communities to work together. Sergeant Mike Bedrich, a suburban public safety officer in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, pointed out awhile back that feral hogs cross community boundaries. “Those hogs are traveling back and forth between all of those areas,” Bedrich said, which means catching the hogs must be a collaborative effort. If one town has an aggressive hog control program and the neighboring town does not, “then you haven’t really dealt with the problem.”

Finally, the feral hog experts emphasize, the people trying to trap wild hogs must be as cunning as their prey. For example, the Fort Worth Nature Center uses traps to get rid of its porky interlopers. As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram explained in a 2010 article, the Nature Center’s staff lets the hogs “become comfortable entering the traps in the hope that more will follow.” Robert Denkhaus, the Center’s natural resource manager, stressed that it is very important not to spring the trap too soon. “If the trigger goes too quick and [the animal] gets away, that pig just learned what a trap is,” Denkhaus said.

So what can higher education learn from the feral hog experts? First, like Texas towns annoyed by wild pigs, we in the academic community must admit that lazy tenured professors are a serious problem. Most colleges and universities have a significant number of unproductive faculty members and they contribute to driving up the cost of higher education.

Second, everyone in the academic community must work together to identify and confront the lazy tenured professor. It is not just the provost’s job to maintain academic standards. All professors must do their part to hold their colleagues accountable. That means the departmental compensation committee must stop giving unproductive professors a satisfactory rating when they make their merit pay recommendations.

And—like feral hog trappers, department chairs and college deans must become wilier in documenting the lazy professor’s shortcomings. At a minimum, that means college administrators must stop taking lazy professors' annual activity reports at face value. A professor may list an impressive number of committee assignments on his or her annual activity report. But did the professor attend any committee meetings or do any productive work? 

 And college administrators need to scrutinize publication records with a bit of skepticism. That one-page article in the annual newsletter of the Oklahoma Association of Medieval Literature Professors —is that really a peer-reviewed scholarly publication? And the book that a faculty member miraculously produces from a dust-covered dissertation—was it published by a reputable academic publishing house or was it ginned out by a vanity press?

I write this not as a university administrator but as a tenured professor myself. Higher education in the United States is under a severe financial strain. Professors in some states are already experiencing salary cuts, furloughs, and layoffs. It is in the interest of everyone in the higher education community—administrators, faculty members and staff—to operate our institutions with maximum efficiency. There is no room in today’s universities for unproductive professors, whether tenured or untenured.

Of course, we shouldn’t take the feral hog analogy too far. Lazy faculty members and wild pigs are not entirely similar. For one thing, feral hogs are incredibly fertile; a sow can produce two litters of piglets in twelve months, and each litter can have as many as ten piglets. Our nation's lazy professors don't have that kind of energy.

You're paying 60 grand a year to be taught by this guy?

References

Gene Hall. Feral hog uninvited guest at South Texas Whataburger. Texas Agriculture Talks, September 29, 2011.

B. Hanna. Feral hogs prove to be a nuisance across Tarrant County. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, January 27, 2011.

Mark Mapston. Feral hogs in Texas. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University.

Kate Murphy. A Plan to Poison the Wild Hogs of Texas. New York Times, April 29, 2017.