Finding the best place to hunt, sighting in your weapon, getting the proper gear, locating your target, and making a clean shot is all necessary components of a successful hunt. However, once the animal is down, the real work begins.
First, it’s time to get the animal out of the woods where it expired. To do this, you can either drag the animal out whole or pack it out in pieces. Choosing the latter can save you some effort in transferring the animal from the woods to your truck, but field dressing the animal laying on the ground in the woods can be trickier than when it’s hanging over a nice clean cement slab at home.
Either choice will result in quite a bit of work, but this article is meant to make it as easy on you as possible. Because this website is dedicated to night hunters, this article is written with the assumption that you are going to be performing the field dressing in the dark. However, most of the instructions and information will apply regardless of whether you are doing it with the help of sunlight.
What You Will Need
Depending on whether you plan to field dress the wild hog on the spot, in the woods, or wait until you are at home or camp, you may need a few different things. Either way, there are a few things you should always have anytime you start to field dress a wild hog.
It’s important to have the following gear:
- High-quality, sharp skinning knives;
- Gloves;
- A high-quality, bright light; and
- Water
Skinning Knives
Now, this may seem obvious, and it is – it’s hard to field dress any animal without a knife. However, the fundamental qualities of a hog’s physiological framework render choosing the proper knives even more important than perhaps those of some other game animals.
The most important thing to keep in mind when choosing the right knife is sharpness – you don’t want your knife dulling up on you halfway through the field dressing process. Hogs have thick hair and hide. In addition, dogs are normally very dirty and often covered in mud. This can accelerate the rate in which your blade becomes dull.
So what is the best knife for field dressing a hog? It is best to have two knives on hand. The initial incision of the hog’s outer hide can dull the knife significantly, making it more difficult to finish the job. An inexpensive, effective way to remedy this is to carry a utility knife with you for the initial opening of the animal and your favorite skinning knife to finish skinning the hog.
Utility knives are inexpensive and the blades are easily replaced. This allows you to preserve the sharpness of your skinning knife for the remainder of the job after cutting through the thick, often muddy, hide.
You can pick up a good utility knife in any hardware store, but here is a popular one among hog hunters on Amazon.
Gloves
It’s always a good idea to wear gloves anytime you are handling raw meat. But this precaution applies even more emphatically to wild hogs and predators than herbivores. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), humans can get 24 diseases from wild hogs – most of which relate to consuming undercooked meat. But just handling wild hogs can result in a sickness called brucellosis – usually through contact with an infected hog’s blood, other fluids, or tissues.
The same principles largely apply to predators such as coyotes, foxes coyotes, and bobcats. That is, handling an animal that is infected with rabies can result in humans contracting the disease. Thus, you should always wear a pair of gloves when field dressing hogs, or any wild game for that matter.
A Bright Light
As mentioned in the introduction, this article is aimed at night Hunter’s. Therefore, it assumes that you are going to be field dressing your hogs in the dark. This recommendation is more applicable to those who plan to field dress the hog in the woods before bringing it home, but it’s always a good idea to have a bright flashlight to assist your garage lights when dressing any game.
If you have ever dressed an animal with the use of lights, you know that shadows are a problem. When you have your hands buried in a hog’s body cavity with your knife, you want to make sure you can see where you’re blade is – you don’t want to slice the wrong flesh.
To mitigate this problem, it’s important to have a very bright light that casts a minimum amount of shadow. With this in mind, I recommend the Primos Bloodhunter HD Shadow Free Blood Tracking Light. It’s a very popular bright white light for blood tracking as well, so you can use this light to track your hog, too. Check it out, here, on Amazon.com.
If you don’t have someone to hold the flashlight while you cut, or you just need some extra help from a different angle, Primos also offers a Primos Bloodhunter headlamp. Check out the headlamp, here.
Water
This one may not be as important as the others, but it’s always a good idea to carry a bottle of water with you if you have room for it when you plan to field dress a hog when you don’t have access to running water.
The reason for this is so that you can clean your knife up a bit after you finish. Obviously, a bottle of water will not be sufficient to completely clean your tools, but rinsing the excess blood and hair off of the blade can dramatically decrease the effort it takes to properly clean it up later after it has dried.
Step by Step Guide to Field Dressing a Hog (two methods)
Now that we talked about the proper tools and gear you will need, we can go into the specifics and steps for quickly and efficiently field dressing a hog. The term “field dressing” can mean different things depending on to whom you talk.
Some prefer to remove the internal organs from the animal, leaving the rest of the animal whole until getting it home and fully processing it or taking it to a butcher. Others prefer to dismember the animal, leaving the internal organs inside the torso and only packing out the portions of the animal that are fit for processing.
The method you choose may largely depend on how far you have to pack the animal from where it expired to your vehicle. Don’t worry, this article explains how to do it both ways.
Regardless of the method you use, it is imperative that you get the internal organs separated from the meat as soon as possible to prevent spoiling. You should either remove the internal organs from the torso or remove the limbs and back straps from the torso as soon as possible after the animal has expired.
First Method – Removing Internal Organs from Torso
Again, this method involves removing the internal organs from the animal’s torso and then removing the skin and the limbs after you get the animal home. Because you will be cutting very close to the internal organs, your number one priority here is to keep your blade high enough so that it does not puncture any of the internal organs.
Step 1
Always remember to wear gloves before you begin. First, place your knife blade at the start of the hog’s pelvic bone, from the rear. Next, cut through the hide and skin all the way up to the hog’s belly and chest until you reach where the neck starts. Again, take every precaution to not cut deep enough to puncture an organ.
As mentioned above, I recommend using a utility knife for this step so you don’t dull your primary skinning knife cutting through the thick, dirty hide. A gut hook would also work nicely if you don’t mind sharpening it often.
Step 2
Now that you have an opening in the skin, you can cut through the hog’s sternum and separate the ribs so you can easily remove the heart, lungs, etc. Some people do not cut past the diaphragm, only removing the stomach and intestines and surrounding organs. They ultimately leave the organs above the diaphragm inside the torso. However, I recommend removing all internal organs.
To do this, take your utility knife or other tool and cut through the sternum all the way up to the ending of the hog’s chest. This will allow you to pull the chest cavity apart and reach in to sever the esophagus. I recommend removing as much of the esophagus as possible.
Once the esophagus is severed, you can get a tight grip on the esophagus and you should be able to pull downward towards the rear of the hog and remove all of the internal organs in one pull.
Step 3
Now that you have the organs removed, if the hog is small enough, you can pick his front end up allowing the excess blood to drain from his body to help preserve the meat while you transport the remainder of his body home or to a butcher for further processing.
Pros and Cons of Using Method One
Pros
- It’s quick
Using this method of field dressing is quick and relatively straightforward. It allows you to quickly remove the internal organs from the hog’s torso allowing you to simply load the hog up in your truck and take it home for further processing.
This also may be the best option if the weather is getting
2. It allows you to keep the body intact for easier processing later
You may wish to hang the hog up to finish skinning and dismembering it. Because this method keeps the hog’s body intact, it’s easy to just hang it up and go to work.
3. Easier to Save more of the edible meat
By bringing the entire body out except for the internal organs, you can process the hog so that you can utilize all of its edible meat. That is, you can process its ribs, jaw, and neck. The second method of field dressing makes that much more difficult.
Cons
- Harder to pack the meat out
If you leave the hog’s limbs and torso intact, it requires you to transport more of the overall mass. You can get more edible meat out, but it also requires you to bring out a lot of the hog that you will likely not use. The second method of field dressing saves you from disposing of a lot of scrap meat and bone.
2. Higher risk of puncturing an organ
Using this method requires you to remove the internal organs from the hog’s torso. This makes the risk of puncturing an organ much greater. You should always wear gloves when handling a hog, but handling the internals, even non-punctured ones, is much more dangerous in terms of disease.
3. Requires disposal of the carcass after processing
This one was hinted at in con 1. Unless you plan to absolutely utilize every portion of the hog, you will have a significant amount of carcass left after you have removed the primary meat. This requires a much more involved disposal depending on the circumstances.
Second Method – Gutless Method (Two ways to do it)
This section explains how to field dress a hog without gutting it. This second method involves much more effort and will take significantly longer. However, it can save a substantial amount of time in the long run. It will also save you from dragging that heavy hog to your vehicle, which can be quite the chore depending on how far you are from it and on what terrain the hog expires.
There are actually two ways of doing this method – one requires fewer steps and less precision, but does not result in as clean a final product, while the other takes longer and more effort but will save time in the long run.
Both ways involve removing the limbs from the hog’s torso and leaving the internal organs, torso, and head in the field. The more detail oriented and precise way of doing this method requires you to debone the hams and shoulders, allowing you to only pack out the processable meat.
The quicker way to do this is to merely remove the hog’s shoulders and hams along with the back straps (and tenderloin if you wish to put in the effort to get them) and pack out the ham and shoulder bones and all. Depending on where you are, how fast you need to get back to your vehicle, how much weight you need to save, and whether you desire the meat still attached to the bone for cooking purposes, you will have to determine which way of conducting this second method of field dressing is best for you.
Quickest, but Less Weight-Saving Way of Doing Gutless Method
Regardless of which way you want to do this, the first step is essentially the same. Your goal is to peel back the hide so that you can remove the limbs and back straps. Depending on which way you want to do that will determine how much of the hide you will peel there in the field.
You want to harvest the back straps regardless of how you pack out the rest of the meat as it is usually the best part save for the inside tenderloin. So I recommend starting by cutting around the hog’s legs, close to its hoofs; you can start with the back legs or front legs.
Next, run your knife up the inside of the legs (front and back) under the hide in order to peel the hide away from the meat. Then skin back the hide so that the meat is exposed (do this on both the hams and shoulders).
Now, for this method, you can remove the hams and shoulders and carry them out whole, which will require more processing later. To do this, simply locate the joint and cut through the meat until you can access the joint to sever the hams and shoulders from the torso. Now, you can place the hams and shoulders in your pack and move on to the back straps.
For the back straps, take your utility knife and split the hide down the hog’s back from the neck to the ham so you can peel away the hide. You want to do this on both sides of his back area where the back straps are. Next, simply cut out the back straps and place them in your pack. You’re now finished and can start your hike back to your vehicle.
Note that you can harvest the inside tenderloin using this method, but it is a bit difficult to explain in text. In short, you can cut a small hole in the hogs belly area (making sure not to puncture an organ) and reach up inside to harvest the tenderloin. You shouldn’t even need a knife; you should be able to simply tear the meat from the bone (if you do use a knife, make sure you are very careful as you will not be able to see what you’re doing with both hands inside the hog’s body cavity). However, this is a lot of effort for such a small amount of meat. So it’s up to you.
So that’s the quickest may of doing method two. However, as you can see, it will require you to still pack out a lot of weight because you are carrying a lot of bone. You could even leave the hide on the hams and shoulders – which would save more time, but add even more weight.
More Time Consuming, but Weight Saving Way of Doing Gutless Method
If you want to minimize the weight load of packing out the harvested hog meat, this second way of doing the gutless method is best. It also save you a lot of time after you get the meat home. This section explains how to debone a wild hog. For this method, follow the steps described for the first way of doing method two but once you get the hide peeled away, instead of removing the entire hams and shoulders, remove the meat from them and only pack it out.
Once the hide is removed, simply cut the meat away from the hams and shoulders similar to how you would when processing the meat before freezing it. This eliminates the need to remove the bones from the torso and saves tons of weight because you’ll only be packing out the meat.
For the back straps, follow the same steps described above.
Pros and Cons of Gutless Method
Like method One, there are pros and cons that accompany the gutless method. First I’ll list the pros and then the cons.
Pros
- Saves weight (especially the deboning way)
This eliminates the need to pack out the entire hog, allowing you to save a significant amount of weight.
2. Saves time in the long run
You’ll have to remove the limbs and/or the meat later, so doing it in the field saves time and effort after you get home.
3. Eliminates the risk of puncturing an internal organ
Puncturing an organ can be dangerous because of the toxins and potential exposure to disease. This method eliminates the need to remove the organs or even cut into the body cavity.
4. No need to dispose of the carcass after processing
Since this method allows you to leave the carcass in the field, you don’t have to worry about disposing of it later.
Cons
- Time consuming
Probably the most obvious negative aspect of this method is the time it takes to take the hog apart. If you’re in a hurry to get out of the field, this method may not be your best choice. Although, if you’re a substantial distance from your vehicle, taking the time to take the hog apart might actually save you time in the long run because of the extra effort it will take to drag the entire body out.
2. Can hinder ability to cook the meat on the bone
If you debone the meat in the field, this will eliminate your ability to cook the meat later, on the bone – a method for achieving a
3. Wastes meat
By only packing out the hams, shoulders, and back straps, you leave some meat that is eatable such as the neck and ribs. Some even eat hogs’ jaw and feet. However, these portions of a hog usually provide lower quality meat and a small quantity. If you need to save weight for whatever reason, leaving these portions for the scavengers may be worth it for you.
Conclusion
So depending on who you talk to, the term “field dressing” can mean different things. This article has explained two primary methods of preparing a hog to remove it from the field. The method you should choose will largely depend on your ultimate goal – that is whether you wish to save time or weight. For saving time, you should use the gutting method; for saving weight, the gutless method, especially the second way of doing it, is you is your best bet. I hope this has been helpful and good luck.