let's go find some pigs
today we're going down to texas we're gonna take our thermals and we're hunting hogs
highly addictive way to hunt you're up all night
you sleep during the day you're the ultimate predator
i've gotten to where i don't shoot them all the time because i wait to run out of meat
before I shoot another one
texas style there goes whitetail there's a lot of whitetail here
my buddy ben bishop over there at sig sauer said hey dan let's go down to texas so i didn't
hesitate we went down to test out the new sig echo threes i've never used a thermal they're illegal
here in wyoming you know i went down there just kind of not sure what type of hunt i was gonna
get into i brought my bow i didn't know you know what kind of action i was going to have if
i could do some spot and stalking or not it's like five o'clock after it gets dark i have my
savage ar-10 back there with the thermal
we had basically two tactics that we used and we would sit in basically these box stands
and just wait now it's really thick down there so the boys would go out there with their side
by sides and sprinkle corn out and that's a very common tactic down there sprinkle some
corn on the roads right before dark and get those pigs drawn out of the brush and kind of
locked in on the road so you can let them have it all right we're sitting on the thermal scope here
just watching this enduro it's like 6:45 and it's pitch black so it is half a long set
all righty
that was awesome
it's almost like you're in a movie because like you're doing all this at night
and you don't get to do this anywhere else in the world like this and at night on hogs
you have the advantage let me tell you what if you had the hog problem that we have you'd be
doing we'd be big you know plus the table fair hog is absolutely in some respects you know you go up
there and i've eaten whitetail out of montana in the alfalfa fields to me that was the sweetest
meat you could eat you know then you come down here and you start shooting hogs and the meat
everybody says they're hogs they don't taste but it's just a delicious fare it's to me it's more
entertaining than the whitetail i would rather eat a hog than whitetail yeah cooking it right
you're doing it right it is delicious so yeah these are fat hogs these are the biggest hogs
i've ever killed really yeah 150 180 pound types i mean it's a big pig i mean these are the fattest
i've ever killed compared to anywhere else and bigger i mean hey they get to eat here yeah
exactly they know how to eat that's for sure the feral hog is an exotic invasive species that is
wreaking havoc on the native ecosystems of texas texas is home to more hogs than any other state
we did a little bit of sitting and i can only sit for so long
you start dozing off you know before you know it it's 11 30 and 1 o'clock and you're getting tired
coming in for some coffee middle of the night here we're gonna head out again here pretty soon
hunting all night sleep during the day so it's kind of hard to
get used to it takes a few days to really get used to that program so
coffee bags not too shabby
honestly i couldn't tell you the difference between this and just brew coffee drip coffee
all right let's go find some pigs
we did a little bit of sitting and we did a little bit of walking and this is where it was really fun
for me it you know we'd sit till nine o'clock at night and then come back for supper and then
you know maybe some guys would go take a nap for a couple hours and then go back out but i
went right back out so the boys would take me back out on these road stretches and just drop me off
all right we're about ready with our thermal and our suppressor try to find a pig hopefully we can
find a big boar it's like one o'clock in the morning we have like a three-quarter moon and
visibility is pretty good i mean just with the naked eye but
i should be able to glass a little bit too so
we're just gonna go really slow and walk down this enduro and make a big loop through here
thermals and suppressors holy smokes I never thought I'd see the day that i do this
I'm gonna rack one up
oops that was kind of loud
i would just throw on the backpack and just slink around and i would turn on the thermal and i'm
just walking down sendero so just walking down the roads another little trick with this of what i did
down there is i would just take this thing off so it's a very simple attachment system you can
mark where you're at on the rail and you can just pull this off of your rifle and when you're going
out there i mean you can just point this around so you don't have to swing your rifle around with it
attached you can just point this around and scan and that's mostly what we were doing down there
and then with how this is set up you just throw it back on here and you know i'm not advocating
saying that you're going to go shoot a sub moa group at 100 with this thing by just taking it off
and putting it back on but it's going to be really close and when your shots are within 70 yards
i didn't hesitate once with just taking this off using it as you know an optic and a monocular
using it like this and then throwing it right back on the gun and laying down and shooting
a pig i didn't think about it twice and i didn't have any issues close quarter combat
i like to say you're not going to be that far off where it's going to cause an accuracy issue
one thing with hunting out here is you're relying on your ears a lot more you're listening you're
trying to pick up movement you just kind of use your senses a little bit differently
taking your time checking around corners scanning with that echo three
it's pretty cool too because you can see through the brush so you can see pigs
or any animal for that matter through the brush that you couldn't normally see even in daylight
it was really hard to tell your depth perception when you're looking through a
thermal it's so difficult to actually see how far away they were and so
i would like it was kind of funny actually because i'm watching my thermal and i'm sneaking down
there and you know i'd see a rabbit on the road too and i was like okay the rabbit's right here
and that pig's about double the distance maybe he's got to be about 75 yards and so i walked like
10 yards and this rabbit like scampers off and turns out the rabbit's like right here so i'm like
holy smokes this pig has to be like 40 yards away
there's a pig right here down the corner
I'm just gonna lay down in the road and shoot him
so hunting in texas it's a little bit different down there so i came down there with an open mind
and i wanted to do it the texas way and so basically what they have going down there is
a hunt club or like a lease that they have their job is to keep the hogs thinned out
on these properties and they say down there that you got to kill 60 of your population every year
if you want to keep the population steady so it's not growing and so that's a lot of pigs
and when there's that many pigs down there you've got a lot of work to do i'll tell you that right
now so this is the savage msr-10 uh it's a 6.5 creedmoor it's a platform that that savage makes
a few different calibers that you can get this in but it's a heavy-duty uh hard-hitting platform
so i do prefer a little heavier round like that like a creedmoor over a 223 just because
you just you have that knockdown power for those bigger pigs and the last thing you want to do is
run into one of those 175 pound plussers and shoot it with a 223 and get away from you now
these are a really compact thermal you can see how small this thing is and it it does everything for
a consumer thermal that's affordable this is the one to six you can pick it up online for three
thousand bucks which might seem really expensive but most of these thermals that are of any quality
are gonna be six thousand dollars or more uh so for what this thermal can do it's a heck of a deal
it really is and this was my first time using a thermal
let me go back to the menu i'm on the reticle
i'm gonna go down i'm just going through the reticles i like that small reticle right there
so let's just leave it right there for zeroing purposes if you can
see where i hit in reference to the the foot warmer that's stuck to the target that'll help
you're on the bottom left corner of the hand warmer i'm gonna hit it one more time
okay now you're at six o'clock on the bottom of the hand warmer first
off what's new on the echo three is it has a 320 by 240 core so that's considerably better
the display is a 400 by 400 it has a lot more resolution a much better image that you're seeing
the 14 gigabyte memory on board that is going to give you a lot of options for either taking
pictures or recording it has recoil activated recordings or you can go into manual mode and
just hit record and you can record for 30 seconds one minute five minutes or even until the whole
hard drive is full many different color palettes if you want black hot white hot
red hot a lot of different options there i think there's eight total the new echo three
has a 10 degree field of view whereas the original one was a four degree field of view so you're
seeing a lot more of your environment out there there's the reticle mode there's many different
types of reticles sizes of reticles dot circle dot no dot which is cross hairs cross hairs with
a dot in the middle the zero feature if i have a two bullet holes that are low and to the right you
can just move the reticle that's on here down and over and reset it it's a very easy thermal to zero
feral hog's high reproductive rate lack of natural predators and generalist approach to habitat and
diet has allowed them to successfully spread if left unchecked a feral hog population can
triple in just one year a lot of shooting hogs around here i've hunted a lot of different places
for pigs and this is different than anything i've ever experienced it's a different style
getting ready to head out a little bit different it's like it's midnight
and we're gonna go walk the road and see what we can find with our thermals night ops here we go
all right i'm getting ready to head into my stand i'm just gonna walk the road and scan with my
thermal and just see if i can't catch a pig feeding on the road
i wanted to you know lay down and get a good solid rest uh on my swagger there and get
good footage have nice rock solid footage so i lay down and you know those pigs are out there
munching away as long as you got the wind they're not looking around too much you know they'll hear
you if you're making noise that's why you got to go slow but layer down and and let them have it
we cook some bacon in our bacon that's when you know you're doing
things right when you're cooking bacon and bacon
well thanks for having us here we enjoyed it we enjoyed your company
and your intensity it was good oh yeah it gets me all wound up like i said it's in a whole different
way and that's part of beyond the grid what we like to do experience new cultures experience
new ways to hunt i'm going to come down to texas and do it the texas way