13. Wildboar in the North of Scotland

The darkness above Loch Ness hides more than mythical monsters. In this adventure, I discover firsthand the surprising reality of wild boar in modern Scotland – creatures many believe vanished centuries ago.

My journey begins with careful preparation: mounting my thermal scope on a .308 rifle and zeroing it with 180-grain rounds before making the two-hour drive north to Inverness. What follows is a masterclass in nocturnal hunting as my guide Grant leads me through pitch-black terrain to a simple hide overlooking a hillside scarred by boar activity.

The thermal world reveals itself gradually – first a few deer, then a stag, before the unmistakable heat signature of our quarry appears. The anticipation builds as we track the animal through the scope, waiting for the perfect broadside shot. When it comes, the 180-grain bullet does its job perfectly, dropping a substantial sow where she stands.

But the real work begins after the shot. We cross the churned earth to discover a much larger animal than expected. Two grown men struggle for thirty minutes to drag 150kg of wild pork uphill through rough terrain before finally reaching our vehicle. The adventure continues back home with proper processing and mandatory testing for Trichinella – a parasitic disease that requires special handling of wild boar meat.

Beyond the hunting narrative lies a fascinating ecological story. These animals, extinct in Britain since the 13th century, have returned through farm escapes and illegal releases. They now thrive across the country, creating both wildlife management challenges and unique hunting opportunities. Their environmental impact is astonishing – entire hillsides plowed up overnight as they search for roots and invertebrates.

Whether you're a dedicated hunter seeking a new challenge or simply curious about wildlife conservation issues, this tale of prehistoric beasts returning to modern Britain offers both practical insights and an unforgettable adventure in the Scottish highlands.

Transcript

Speaker 2 0:24

Hello and welcome to the Outdoor Gibbon podcast, episode 13. 2023, now January seems to have run away with me. We're now well into February. I am recording this podcast from sunny Bavaria. It is sunny, but on the flip side side of that, we've had overnight temperatures down to minus nine. There's still snow on the ground, but everybody just goes about life as quite normal. Today's about me three degrees.

Speaker 2 0:56

I've been over here for the last week in Germany and into Austria with work related. However, while traveling around the countryside, it's amazing how many high seats and high boxes and uh, high, just yeah shooting positions there are. They're all elevated because the land is very flat. I've seen several herds or groups of deer just sat in the middle of fields. So obviously there's a, there's a problem, um, but yeah, it's. Uh, it's really nice to see.

Wild Boar in the UK

Speaker 2 1:30

So we we ran the poll on the instagram page about what people would like to hear more about. Stories seem to come out on top. A few people were like a few kit reviews. Obviously, doing a kit review on a podcast is not always the easiest because there's no visual cues for it, but we can cover something, and interviews seem to be something else that people would like to have a bit more of so. This year is going to be a bit of a change. We're going to try and get more interviews organized. I will keep on rambling on about experiences and stories and shoots that I've done. This podcast coming up is going to be about my wild boar that I shot up in inverness. We'll get into that in a minute and, uh, hopefully you'll enjoy so.

Speaker 2 2:42

Wild boar. Some people didn't know they still exist in scotland. It's a strange one because actually wild boar in the uk were driven to extinction in the 13th century, basically over hunted, as we did with many things. The pig population since around about 1990 has really started to re-establish itself, possibly due to escaped boar from boar farms and as well as that illegal release which seems to be a big problem.

Speaker 2 3:14

Let's talk about a boar quickly. So on average it could be up to 1.5 meters long, 60 to 80 centimeters tall at the shoulder and it can weigh up to about 200 kilos and they'll live up to 15 to 20 years. It's not the sort of thing you really want to bump into when you're out in the woods. Obviously they look really cute when they're piglets and they're tearing around the place, but the actual damage they can do to a hillside. I didn't believe until I actually saw it. It was absolutely phenomenal. It basically looked like somebody had plowed up the side of this hill as you walked across the ground, well, everywhere you walked it was just soft soil, because basically the boar get their noses and they push their heads underneath searching for roots, worms and other things to eat and, yeah, they can destroy farm fields, hillsides, crops in in a night. If you've got an actual herd of them, that's it. It's um, it's devastation to farmers. They can virtually be found anywhere in the uk.

Speaker 2 4:21

Looking at some of the distribution maps, you've obviously got a population of wild boar up at the end of loch ness, coming down the country, um, there there's a few outbreaks on the borders. As you get further down, um, you get a very high density, uh, in the area just sort of up at gloucestershire area, down into the, the west country, across onto the south coast. If you go up a bit again to Norfolk, suffolk, they can be found up there. So, realistically, there's boar everywhere. But as these populations grow, there's even legislation in for colling and things like that of wild boar and I believe that there's been training courses set up for getting a level one on the calling of wild boar. One interesting fact wild boar hair was used for making toothbrushes back in the day. Obviously now most toothbrushes are made of synthetic materials, but yeah, that was an interesting fact that I discovered about the hairs of wild boar their bristles yeah, they're incredibly tough.

Setting Up the Hunt

Speaker 2 5:27

So let's get started on how we got into this hunt for a wild boar. So, searching around social media, looking at posts, I saw a chap had shot a wild boar and I got talking to him. His name was Grant, he was somewhere, based in Scotland, and I said that was one of the some something that I was really interested in doing. I was hoping to go out to Sweden and do it. And he sort of said well, I can, I can arrange something. You can come up and take a boar up in Inverness. And I was like really, a wild boar up there. So things went on, months went by, nothing happened, and I suddenly decided that, yeah, I really should get, pull my finger out and get this organized. So messaged him a few more times and, uh, and we tried to arrange something and suddenly I was like I'm actually going to get this sorted out. So we arranged a date to go up and to actually take this boar.

Speaker 2 6:23

So my first thing that had to get sorted out was I needed to move my thermal scope that was set up on my 243 and actually move it across onto my 308. I decided to move it onto. I've got a Seiko light barrel 308, and I thought that'll do so. I spent a bit of time taking the scope off, getting it set up, going out, getting it zeroed. The first attempt to get it zeroed the weather changed and it was shocking. Next day got out, finally got it zeroed and sorted. I was happy, shooting at 100 yards, pushed it out to 200, still absolutely no problems. 150 grain soft point seemed to be perfect best around. I had some 180 grain round noses that I loaded probably about 15 years ago. Never used them. Tried those. Yeah, they were bob on. It was absolutely great.

Speaker 2 7:15

So the night came. Well, the afternoon came because obviously he said the the best time to come up and actually take a wild boar is in darkness. We're in the middle of winter so darkness appeared fairly quickly. But he said it's it's much easier to shoot them with the thermal or under the lamp, it's up to you. But but at night was was the best time. So for me it's a two hour, two and a bit hour drive to get up to Inverness.

Speaker 2 7:41

I was given an address to drive to. As I approached it felt a bit weird because the address seemed to be in the middle of a housing estate and I was like this is a bit bizarre, there's going to be no wild boar around here. However, followed it, phoned the number head, popped out of a door and introductions were made, went in, had a cup of tea, chatted away about things, looked at a couple of his trophies up on the wall, some really nice a red, a seeker, a good. He just had his piece of taxidermy back, a lovely roebuck. So we're chatting away, chatting about things, and he's like yep, right, we might as well go now. We'll head up the hillside, get ourselves set in, jump in my truck and and we'll get on.

Speaker 2 8:30

There's always that moment of nervousness that you just jump in some chap's truck that you've you've chatted to on the internet, exchanged a few messages with, and you've got your rifle in the back and he's taking you off in the dark to some hillside somewhere. So we drove out, drove obviously it's dark, you're not going to see a lot Drove down the side of Loch Ness and he's like, oh, we'll just turn up here. Turned up, this track started heading up. I'm like, well, where are we going? It's virtually vertical up a side of a hillside. Then we just pulled over and he's like that's it, we're here, so get yourself organized, we'll wander in.

Speaker 2 9:12

I've got a bit of a hide setup, so got the rifle out, made sure everything was good, got my thermal spotter out, I've got a pulsar head torch and, uh, that was it, locked the car. Then we kind of started descending. He goes you need to be quiet, keep your lights off. And we start going down this sort of a bit of a bumpy track, um, a couple of fallen trees you have to go kind of dip under and go over. He goes, that's it, we're here here. What's here? He goes just by that pallet. We'll tuck in behind that and you'll be able to look out in front of you over the area these boar come from. So we get ourselves settled in. Um, there's a bit of a tree stump sticking out and something else to sit on, and we're sort of looking across this hillside. There's nothing there at the moment.

Speaker 2 9:59

I'm trying to ask him about what my backstops are where I can shoot, etc. Because obviously I can see lights in the distance, but then I can in the thermal. I can see trees and I can't really read the level of the land, if you know what I mean. It's. It's quite difficult using a thermal spotter if you've not not been somewhere and you don't know how the land lays. So he's explaining about the.

Speaker 2 10:24

The hillside runs down to the left hand side. It curves slightly up. Where the trees are there you'll see a fence post. So anything below that fence post it's perfectly safe. You're going to be shooting into into soft ground as you go down to the left hand side. Obviously you can follow the ridge of the hill. Keep below that, because if you shoot too far, you'll shoot too high, you'll put a bullet at the end of Loch Ness.

Speaker 2 10:51

I'm like we don't want to do that. And he goes. Then it drops right down on the left back to the road. But there's trees before that. So you can see the trees in the thermal spot. So that's no problem. But he goes. Sometimes the boar come right from the right, directly above us, through the trees. You won't hear them, you'll only see them in the thermal and I'm like this is a 200 kilo beast type of thing. How won't you hear it? But yeah, it's. Uh, there is. There is soft and gentle walking through the forest, as when you're out stalking a deer.

Speaker 2 11:24

So we're sat there, it's I think it's about eight o'clock just watching the hillside nothing there. Then all of a sudden we see some heat signatures and they've come up over the fence post. It turns out that three deer, three, three female deer of some description. He's like oh, that's all right, that'll be three seeker got loads of seeker on here as well. Um, they're just a pain in the ass. They've got to go put these deer sort of milling about for a bit. Nothing much happening and they're just grazing away by the look of it.

Speaker 2 11:57

Time carries on. I think about another 20 minutes later we see some movement down to the bottom left Looks like a stag has kind of come in. He's just walked in and just sat down. The three hinds, seeker hinds they're still there. And then slowly, all of a sudden, one of them gets up and walks back over the hillside Quickly, followed by the other two. Not sure, maybe this stag that's coming down the bottom spooked them, can't work it out. The wind directions all towards us so they shouldn't have smelt him or anything like that. But you never know, anything could be swirling around out there. So we're still scanning the hillside, scanning up to the right, looking nothing's happening. Stag's quite happy. He's just sat down. Obviously it's end of the rut. He's uh, he looks a bit knackered, to be honest.

Speaker 2 12:52

Got the rifle up just playing around checking the thermal. We're discussing our two rifle, two thermal setups. Um, I'm quite liking this infrared unit. I've got on mine. It's working quite well, everything's clear. Well, compared to that, to the old thermal spotter I've got, it's night and day the. The picture quality, the sharpness is absolutely fantastic. It's a bit cooler. And so we're discussing about battery life and stuff like that and how long, how long the batteries last. So put the thermal on the scope off. Again. Still scanning the hillside nothing as of yet.

The Night of the Hunt

Speaker 2 13:29

All of a sudden, grant's like there's something coming in just over there, just above the trees, and yet just on the right hand side, faint glow of something moving down towards the left. He's like I think it is, I think it could be, and it gets a bit, gets into picture more. I'm looking yeah, it's definitely something. He's like, yeah, it is, I think it could be and it gets a bit, gets into picture more. I'm looking. Yeah, it's, it's definitely something he's like. Yeah, it's a pig. It's definitely a pig. It's on its own. It'll probably be a boar, because there's nothing else with it. Perfect, I've got the rifle up now. Switch the scope on.

Speaker 2 14:00

I'd been messing around with it earlier, making sure that I knew how to record what I was going to do, so got the footage off it and watch him, zoomed in a bit. Yep, there's, there it is. I can see this pig now, clear as day, just moving earth and mooching around. It's not in any prop, not in any rush, it's not doing anything. Getting myself comfortable, is that? Yeah, when you're ready, uh, just wait. Oh, it's gone behind some bracken. But when you're ready, take the shot.

Speaker 2 14:27

So, keeping an eye on it and it's sort of mooching around. Mooching around just disappears behind a bit of what must be bracken or something like that, and it, uh, we're watching, and it starts to turn. No safe shot. It's now looking directly towards us and then it turns again, pointing itself back up the hill. Nothing, you can't get a shot on it. Then, all of a sudden, it just turns around again, as if it's heading back down the hill. Absolute perfect placement.

Speaker 2 14:53

Bring the rifle up, he goes. You need to shoot it, though. Sort of well, obviously, with a boar, you shoot them a bit further forward and sort of uh, you don't want to run, so he goes. If you can take a next shot on it, just drop it, because we don't want to go chasing after it. So I've got the rifle on it, remembering exactly where the neck is. Obviously I've been googling this earlier to make that shot set myself up, calm my breathing down, squeeze the trigger and bang. He's like it just dropped on the spot. I'm like, oh, those 180 grains obviously work really well. And it did. It literally just went straight down, perfect.

Speaker 2 15:32

So we settled ourselves back down, scanned the hillside just in case anything else was going to come out, looked down to our left. Mr Stagg still sat there. He obviously is absolutely knackered. He didn't care what happened, he's just chilling, no issues. We're watching, looking up and down the hill. Again, there's nothing else showing, nothing else is looking like it's going to come out. So we leave it for about sort of another 20 minutes, half an hour just watching the stag seeing if any more pigs are coming down. Nothing's coming out. Um, it's like, yeah, yeah, we might as well go over. We'll go over and get it.

Speaker 2 16:09

So get ourselves organized. He gets his head torch out, make safe the rifles and we start crossing this. Well, it is quite a large open bowl of land and, as I said to you, it's churned up. You're walking along and the ground's soft and I'm like what has done all of this? He's like that's what they do. They just come in and they just rake through the roots trying to get all the goodness out of the ground, the worms, everything, just eating everything. They go, and we're looking for this pig.

Speaker 2 16:40

He's like it's down this way. I'm like are you sure it's down this way? I'm like, are you sure? I thought it was up here? Obviously it's quite disorientating at night when you're looking through something that only gives you a black and white image, virtually. Um, and we're scanning around and it had dropped. But it had dropped behind the bracken so it was a bit more sort of invisible at this point.

Speaker 2 16:58

Scanning, scanning, scanning and we find it. And as we approach it, he's like that's quite a big, big animal. I'm like, yeah, it's, uh, it is a big animal, get a bit closer. It's, uh, it's even bigger than we thought it was. It looked quite small at that distance, to a thermal, but uh, yeah, you suddenly get over to it and you're confronted with this big black, hairy pig lying there and, um, he's like, lift that, lift up the leg. He's like, hmm, it's not, it's not a boar, it's a sow. Strange though that it was on its own.

Speaker 2 17:32

So on the hillside we, we open it up, growling out this sow. Obviously it's a bit different to growlick in a deer, because actually all of the intestines and everything like that are different they're. They're a different color, they have a different smell. But just break most of it down. Just get all the nasty bits out, do a few photos with it, obviously first bore and all of that. You've got to. You've got to get a picture on the side of the hill. Uh, photos are taken. It looks absolutely massive in the pictures and it's like right, um, how are we getting this out?

The Shot and Recovery

Speaker 2 18:11

He goes, we're dragging it back up the way we came and it's like, oh, okay, now I've dragged the red stag and they're heavy. This thing's just like, it's just a lump, isn't it? So he's got a strap, I've got a strap Tie him around. It's like off we go, I tell you what, two big lads pulling this thing up the hill. It weighed and we're huffing and puffing. I think the extraction was probably the best part for half an hour. He's like we can't keep going up. We've kind of got to go down around to get back on the track and you've got to watch out for the big holes that are either side and all the rest of it, and I was, yeah, huffing and puffing. We get to the track and it's like now we've got to pull this thing back up the track. We've come down under a fallen tree, over a fallen tree, uh, to get it back up to the road um so, yeah, we got there.

Speaker 2 19:05

Finally. He's like I'll actually go and get the car for the last 50 metres. So I'm standing there kind of just catching my breath. He drops down, gets the car, brings it back up and then we have to lift this thing up into the boot of the car as you watch the springs on the back of his get a Range Rover go down and that's a certainly is a fair lump. Didn't quite realize how much of a lump until we got back to his and then I got out my, my blue drag barrel. Well, it completely filled. That completely filled the back of my truck and, yeah, went back in back to his house, sat down, had a good chat about things, had a cup of tea and we're getting later now so we decided that probably the best time to head off and go home. So two and a half hour drive home, fairly knackered, after shooting a wild boar, dragging it up a hill. It's late at night.

Speaker 2 20:01

I think I got home around about sort of the 1am mark. I thought Mr Piggy can stay in the car. I'll deal with her in the morning. When I got in the house I suddenly realized there was um you had to do. I'd read about, uh, chickenella testing when I was talking to my my friends in Sweden, I was like I quickly started googling that and it's like you need to order a kit, uh, and then from this kit, we'll do the test which turned out to be free, and we'll send you back the results to make sure. It's like you need to order a kit, uh, and then from this kit, we'll do the test which turned out to be free, and we'll send you back the results to make sure it's safe to eat. And I'm like, well, better order one of these then, because obviously I don't want to go and butcher that thing up to find out that it's got some disease that makes it that I shouldn't eat it. So, of course, at this point, fill in the forms um, send it off.

Speaker 2 20:47

Next morning comes around. I'm like right, I've got to go and deal with miss piggy. Go to the back of my truck, open it up light of day, see how big this thing is. I've got a winch. So on my where my gambrel and area is for prepping things, and you hear that sort of struggling to lift it up and I'm like, yeah, there's a, there's a fair weight. Um message grant thanked him again for letting me yeah, taking me out and all the rest of it. And he normally says he just he skins them off and things like that. And I'd spoken to other people about skinning them, um.

Speaker 2 21:19

So it was a case of I was going to break it up, quarter it and hang it in the chiller and then wait for the test to come through. Now, luckily, very luckily, when we'd groliced it on the hillside I'd left the diaphragm in and sort of the heart and all the other parts. So the test results require that you actually send a small section or small amount of meat of the pillar of the diaphragm so that they can do the test on it. It seems as though the bacteria or the worm which is Trichinella actually thrives by being in that sort of meat area. There's three test points. One is under the chin, one's in the front forearm of the animal or the. The best sampling point is the diaphragm.

Trichinella Testing and Processing

Speaker 2 22:11

So I took my shoulders off. What did I do? Where did I cut it? Split, split it in half across the rib cage so I had a front half split in half against the back legs so I could hang the back legs up. Separated the back legs, so I had two back legs and basically it was in five pieces at this point, hung it in the chiller because it was just too heavy to actually try and move by myself. It was easy to split it up a bit and time went on. I had an email back while I was doing all of this from the test center saying yep, no problem, we've dispatched first class to you five test kits. Thank you very much. The testing's free of charge, excellent. So it was fine. I was going to hang it for a few days and we'd get this sorted the next couple of days.

Speaker 2 23:03

The test kits arrived, took the sample of meters requested, got it in the post straight away. However, royal mail were doing postal strikes so I'd sent my sample. It said do not send it on a friday. So didn't send it on a friday. I sent it on a monday, kept it in the fridge. I kept more of the diaphragm as well in the fridge so that just in case anything happened that I needed more, sent it off. Well, my test results didn't arrive there for 10 days, so I'd emailed the, the lady that had sent it out. She went that should be fine, but send us another sample anyway, just in case your sample doesn't arrive. So I was all prepped to do that when I had an email back saying oh, we've just received your sample, we've run the test. Your pig's clean Happy days Granted. He said he'd never had any problems with any of the ones he'd shot because he'd been running the testing. But it's always worth checking.

Speaker 2 24:01

Because of time and all the rest of it, I'd already started butchering up and backpacking a lot of the meat because I didn't want to leave it any longer. So I'd made my pork chops and I'd got other cuts out of that and I made a load of mints and it was all frozen anyway. But yeah, it's, it's really nice. Now I've got these test kits. Um preparation, it's always better. Probably should have had the test kits before I went to shoot the wild boar, but benefits of hindsight. So, yeah, any time you go out, make sure you're already prepped or whoever's taking you out has got a test kit so you can send it off straight away. It delay, it doesn't delay then the process of of dealing with your animal. Obviously I had space to hang it, but you wouldn't want to leave it not hung and you wouldn't want to go through all the work of preparing it for them to come back and say to you well, actually you shouldn't really be eating that or you shouldn't go into the food chain. We now have a freezer full of wild boar. We had one piece of boar for christmas and it was absolutely fantastic. So, yeah, the work going into actually getting one.

Speaker 2 25:04

Yeah, better preparation in the future might be a good idea. Better extraction route ground would be good. Needed to say something about cutting a track and potentially a quad or something like that to pull them out. But if you are thinking of going after a boar, it is something that's totally different and, yeah, the size of the beast that you actually could come away with. If you shot a piglet, no problem, you put it under your arm when you carry it out. But shooting a 150 kilo sow was certainly something. Yeah, something that makes you work for getting your bacon up the hill, quite literally.

Speaker 2 25:41

Next time I spoke to a friend of mine it's a butcher and he told me the method to actually take all of the what would I call them the bristles off it, but that's a fairly, fairly big process of boiling water and basically scraping them off. You have to scald the skin in some ways. Really, you should do it before you open the animal up and it's like, well, yeah, it's, it's one of those things. It's who has that much boiling water on the side of the hill? You don't really and you don't want to contaminate the meat by getting boiling water over it. So that may be something we'll try on the next one. But yeah, anybody looking to do wild boar, they are around the place and if you're up in scotland they're over towards inverness and it's well worth getting in touch with grant and trying to book in with him Because, yeah, it was a good, fun experience. I will definitely be going back to get another one.

Speaker 2 26:35

Probably best to actually explain what trichinosis or trichinella actually is. It occurs by eating raw or uncooked meat of an animal infected with the larvae of a species of worm called trichinella. Obviously, that species of worm gets into the skin or the muscle tissue where it stays. That's why they always talk about you should cook pork completely. There's other worms that you can get in there as well. That can be problems. Tapeworms are quite bad for in pigs and things like that.

Speaker 2 27:08

But it's not a nice thing to have and there are some serious symptoms you can get with it nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, fever, abdominal discomforts, uh, are the first symptoms, but then it gets worse. You get headaches, fevers, chills, swelling. The whites of your eyes actually can swell, can discolor as well, um, so, yeah, it's, it's well worth making sure that your pig is clean before you go to eat it, because the last thing you want is to have to go through all of this and then go through actually trying to uh, to get rid of it, through actually trying to get rid of it. If you can get rid of it, it's. Yeah, it's not a good thing to have. So, yeah, that test kit's well worth doing.

Closing Thoughts and Future Plans

Speaker 2 27:57

And for those of you that might like eating other exotic things, obviously trichinosis doesn't just occur. Trichinella does not just occur in pigs, it can also be found in bears. Wild felines such as cougar foxes, dogs, wolves, horses, seals, walruses are also at risk of it. So if you've got a an appetite for eating anything exotic, make sure it's safe before you put it in your mouth. Thanks for listening to episode 13, the hunting of a wild boar. We plan a few more hopefully foreign holidays, possibly a trip to sweden to go and hunt wild birds over a pointer, maybe towards the back end of the year. I'm sure there'll be other things to to talk about as we go through. It might even go back a bit to some other hunts we've done in the past and and retell those as well. But anyway, till next time. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you on episode 14.