Cheers to all the replies. Hogsy, things have changed a lot since I started pigging. I think it may be me that needs to learn! My earliest memories go back to the early seventies when there were no chillers, no stinkin cotton, lots more scrub and a lot less people driving round with "all the gear".
You could just drive down a bore drain and shoot as many as you like on lots of places. The first opportunity to sell pigs was to sell em live just over the border in Qld, but you had to run the border crossings, obviously I never did that!! 1974 was a real wet year and lots of places like the Gingham Raft hadn,t dried out when another big wet hit in 1976. The next few years were unbelievable. We used to hunt on horses a lot, no quads then, and it would still be a gud way to hunt if your not worried about the carcase or getting the pig to the chiller. It was quite easy to get half a dozen from the one mob if your dogs ran on. We used to spine the pigs from the saddle, safe for the dogs, and they soon let go and went again.
The chillers changed everything. Soon as money came into it lots more people headed off with a crate and whatever boorimas they could find or steal. Some real good hunters started full time, not just on weekends and the numbers fell and the pigs became scarcer. Then you got boys like Russel G and his brother, Big Garry, Peter B, etc going hard they soon made an impact.
I worked on one place that was 60,000 acres and started trapping real hard. I wiped em out! In the end I pulled the traps out of one 10,000 acre corner just so I had somewhere to run my dogs. I,m sure there are still plenty of pigs, but a lot more acres/hours between them. It may be a bit frustraing adapting to the modern scene.
