Hog hunting with Your M1A Rifle and What You Should Know

Hog hunting can be a lot of fun if you do it right. An M1A is an ideal hunting rifle, but you have to make sure you can find hogs to shoot. You'll need to find natural hog trails so that you can put feeders down for the hogs to find. If you put the feeders in obscure places, you're diminishing the likelihood that you'll get to bag a hog. Put the feeder where hogs travel. Find a trail or a wallow and that’s where you'll need to put it.

Using hog scents is as effective as using feeders, but again you must put it where the hogs naturally travel for them to be able to find it. Choose dominant boar urine or heat scent, and be sure you're actually putting it where hogs will naturally be near a stream, wallow or trail.

You'll also want a good hunting light to shine on the feeder. Being able to light up the target will make all the difference in both how much enjoyment you'll get from the hunt and how accurate your shots are.

Get yourself a good hog hunting light to hunt at night with. A good feeder light will make those late night and early evening shots much easier to make. Also, you can help attract hogs to your feeder by adding sweetness to it. Any sort of sweet, fruit-flavored powdered drink mix will work as long as you can smell it when you drop it into the feeder and it smells sweet. This tends to attract the hogs.

As far as using an M1a for hog hunting, you'll find it's a bit heavier than some other hunting rifles you may be used to. But the biggest factor in making sure you have a successful hog hunt with your M1A is going to be your scope. You're going to want to be within 100 yards of the target for best results, so a scope with at least 7x magnification should be ideal. Also, the smaller the MOA the better so go with 2 over 4, for instance.

Neck and head shots are the best for bringing down a wild boar, and in order to get that precision shot you don't want to be too far away with a poor scope. Any shot you make typically in the head and above the shoulders of the hog should be a fast, fatal shot. Otherwise, there's the risk of only injuring the creature. Shoulder and front quarter shots are undesirable because of the animal's tough hide and fat, and lack of vital organs. You can avoid the bad shots by making sure you have a well-secured scope and the proper setting on your sight so that you can get a good aim at whatever yardage you're sitting away from the hog.

You also don't want to get too close and alert your prey, because they can be dangerous. Standard .308 ammunition works well for hog hunting, if you go with the heavier bullets.

Related posts:

1. The Best Ammunition to Buy For Your M1A Rifle
2. Lini’s First Time Shooting the M1A Scout
3. Shooting 1000 Yards with your M1A Rifle: What You Should Know
4. Another M1A Contest: Win a New Burris FastFire II Red Dot Sight
5. What You Should Know About The M1A Rifle
6. Cool High Speed Video of an M1A Rifle Shooting