Hog trap and trapping has been around as long as we have had hogs in Texas. Traditional traps use a trip wire in the back of the trap to trigger the door. A trapper will bait the site until the hogs are conditioned to the trap. This conditioning includes having the trap door in the open position, without the trip wire engaged. Once the hogs freely enter the trap through the door, the wire is engaged. The next time the hogs enter the trap and engage the trip wire located at the back of the trap, the door shuts. Here in lies the the problem. You will catch hogs. How many? That’s up to God. You have no way of controlling when the first hog will hit the trip wire. You could catch one, you could catch 10. Who knows. The problem with this is that you are almost guaranteed to not capture the entire sounder. When the gate shuts and say only 2 of a sounder of 10 are trapped, the 8 outside are now educated to avoid trapping systems possibly forever. I’m dealing with this issue on a property in Austin county as I write this. The property was using a similar trip wire trapping system with little success other than one or two catches. The remaining sounder was educated through this process. I came in and removed the old trap and waited a few weeks before bringing my Jager Pro System onsite. That said, I’ve been conditioning the hogs for well over 120 days now and haven’t closed the gate. I’ve made over 50 trips to this property and used well over 60 bags of corn. The Jager Pro Trap allows me to see the hogs in real time by way of Cell camera. Pictures are sent to my cell phone. The trap is built in panels and you add more panels as the hogs get conditioned to the bait site. Once enclosed, you then monitor to drop the gate when the entire sounder is inside the trap. By monitoring the pictures, I know the sounder group is 9 and so that is my target. I’ve have many nights of 1, 2 4 and 6 but not the full 9 once enclosed. So I wait. I wait to take the full 9 and eliminate any possibility of educating these hogs further.
