Man Shoots 416-Pound Wild Hog In Texas

A Texas man, fed up of a 416-pound wild hog that was destroying his property from five years, took the matter into his own hands more than a week ago when he decided to end the nuisance.

Joe Clowers, who lives in Union Grove in east Texas, said the beast used to prey on the fawns in the area. He added that he always used to arm himself with his gun, an AR-15, in a bid to prevent the wild hog from going on a rampage.

"My property lays between some populated areas and I try to maintain an environment like a sanctuary or nursery for the deer to raise fawns," Clowers told Houston Chronicle. "He was the big daddy. I called him the bush beast."

Clowers finally got the chance to shoot and kill the hog on Oct. 14. The Gregg County Game Warden's official Facebook page shared a couple of pictures to commemorate Clower’s kill. One picture showed the body of the mammoth beast and another showed Clowers holding its corpse upside down.

Although hog meat makes for a tasty meal, the beast in question was inedible since its flesh was kept out in the open for too long after it was killed by Clowers. The Texas man plans to mount the beast's body on the wall of his home as a trophy.

According to a Fox News report, the state of Texas is home to almost 4 million wild hogs. Apart from pests like mosquitoes, fire ants, snakes, and rats, wild hogs are among the animals that the state has to deal with. A lot of these animals are increasingly finding their way into the developed suburbs.

Curiously, in a similar incident, a wild boar wreaked havoc inside a commercial store in Germany on Friday. The incident was captured by a CCTV camera in Germany — a video that has since gone viral.

After the German police warned the residents of the town of Heide that two wild boars were running loose in the city, an aggressive one entered one of the shops lining a street. The wild hog got into the store through the double doors of an optician's store, downtown, and chasing the employees present inside the facility.

This hog weighed lot lesser than the one killed in at the Texas home (154 pounds). The video footage shows the creature running amok inside the store while the staff members, scared of the beast, scramble around.

The hog was eventually corralled between the entrance of a Sparkasse bank and two cop cars and the police gunned down the notorious beast. "The first shot was enough," Ulf Stecher, the town mayor said. "That was an extremely unusual situation. I never thought we would see such a thing here."