Eating feral pigs

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Just wondering if it is safe to eat feral pigs. If so who does and does it taste like store bought pork.
How do you go about skinning etc? I have heard something about boiling water.
Sorry for all the Q's but i like to make the best use of any game i take.
Thanks
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[bowhunting4eva]

when i went out west the farmer told me if i get a pig bring it to him and he will gut it in a special way to sell. he gets a $1 a kg.
i also had a freind that used to keep his own pork but only on clean healthy looking pigs.
i have also heard that pigs have worms as well thou

[FarmasFrog]

We would eat it when we where kids.
Just treated it like any other animal with skinning getting ect.
or we would just take a leg or something to cook up.
Just let it sit for a few days I would say.
FarmasFrog

[Miga]

A few years ago we shot (rifle) & dogged a couple of pigs and took them in to the chillers who at the time were paying $1.30 / kg. The bloke there was telling me they export the meat to Germany where it is in high demand.
So yes you can eat feral pig as long as the liver is clean and you can't see any obvious disease or parasites.
Using boiling water as you mentioned is a very effective way to remove the hair. I used this method when I was overseas - we placed the carcus on top of a chain in an old bathtub, poured boiling water in it, then repetedly dragged the chain from side to side & top to bottom.

[Dale Furze]

I have eaten it quite a few times. Generally, smaller healthy pigs go into the freezer, pigs around the size of a big bull dog. As said before, just dress them in the same manner as anything else, boil the hair off if you want to eat the skin. Most of the time they are a little stronger in flavor than the penned variety. The fat little fellas that I have eaten were mostly mountain pigs that were eating good food. I wouldn't eat a scrawny carrion eating channel country pig.
Dale.

[rohan]

yeah i'm with dale, i wouldn't eat a pig in bad nick thats been eating dead carcasess but if the pig was eating good tucker i would. my dad has and he roasted it and said it was beautiful.
rohan

[GREG 2533]

I wish i knew someone who worked at a chiller knock over a few pigs n get a few bucks on the side sounds good to me!!

[wayoutwest]

I talked to AQIS today at work i was told that like all australian big game they DO NOT carry any major disease the most harmfull thing you can get from pigs are worms or a tusk up ya arse. When i say that they dont carry any major disease its because if they do contract something they will die in 3 or 4 weeks. Plus another thing DO NOT gut the big before scalding it sets the meat off quicker my father and my uncle had pigs for 15 years not did they split the gut of a pig.

[woody]

Just wondering if it is safe to eat feral pigs. If so who does and does it taste like store bought pork.
How do you go about skinning etc? I have heard something about boiling water.
Sorry for all the Q's but i like to make the best use of any game i take.
Thanks
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And Google said

http://www.sausagesource.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1269

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Thanks Woody, very informative site.
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[R.K]

As Miga said wildes Schwein is a delicacy in Germany.

I have family there who pay very good money for this meat.

But then Germans do love their pork.

[GREG D]

I didn't think the chiller operators took bow shot pigs because of the internal organ damage! But I may be wrong.

I have eaten them before, mainly the back straps and the occasional rear quarter. Got rid of the hair by the boiling water method which works well (mostly). The missus and kids weren't all that keen on the few black hairs left behind, so if the family are a bit sensitive like mine (ie, if it aint on a foam tray wraped in plastic, I aint eat'n it) use an old razor to get rid of the stuborn bits of hair.

[misfit01au]

I agree whit what wayoutwest said. The pigs that are diseased often die within a short period of time. As for the internal parasites, cooking usually kills them all. We have caught trevally of fraser island that have had gut parasites. We carefully cleanded them and the ones with the least parasites we cooked well. they were fine to eat and tasted bloody good. We even had the worms checked by the queensland museum (good contacts :D) and they confirmed that the majority of parasites die after bring cooked

[Viking]

A mate and I caught a pig with the dogs when we went to Texas a few months ago. Cut the back legs off, and kept them in the freezer for a while. We had almost forgotten about it until we thought how good it would be to have a Sunday roast. I've never been a fan of crackling anyway, so instead of removing the hair, I just cut the skin off. Put it in a baking dish covered in foil for a couple of hours, and served it with sweet potato and pumpkin. Beautiful! It definitely has more taste than the pork you'd buy at Woolies.

Feral pigs get a lot of exercise, as opposed to the domesticated sty-bound variety, so the meat is very lean. Because it has so little fat, the next time I'm cooking one up I'll put it in one of those Glad baking bags, so the juices stay in; otherwise it can tend to go a bit dry.

Another plus is it has none of the hormones and antibiotics that they give to farm-bred pigs to make them grow faster. I've done a bit of research, and I don't like to give it to my kids. They get enough of that in chicken these days.

V