A few years ago, we became aware that there was a need to have a less expensive boar hunt that focused more on the quality of the meat but could be taken in a hunting situation. So, we developed our Russian cross meat boars. A Russian is a cross between a pure European wild boar and something else (usually a domestic hog or a feral hog). We started purchasing female Tamworth gilts to breed with our pure European wild boars. A Tamworth is an old English breed of swine that does very well living and having their pigs right out in the open fields and woods of Europe. We find that these sows are excellent mothers and raise larger litters of much faster growing pigs than our pure Europeans. Because they have larger litters and grow much faster when we cross these with a pure European, we can sell the hunts for much less than the pure European hunt. These hogs have much more fat marbled through their meat, which means much better tasting meat with less of a “gamey” flavor.
We don’t recommend that you get one of these boars mounted. However, many people have skull mounts done with these boars. The weight on these hogs is a little bit more than our pure Europeans–between 225 and 275 lbs. These boars will range in color from solid black, black with dirty white on them somewhere, solid red, red with dirty white on them somewhere, or some variation of spots. When you cross any kind of domesticated hog with a pure wild boar, that dirty white more often that not comes out somewhere on the animal. These boar have spent all of their lives on one of our farms, or on our preserve in open fields and in the woods. We sell more of these boar hunts than anything else. Everyone loves the meat from these boars.
“Super” boars weigh more than 300 lbs. On our preserve, we have been known to have boars weighing more than 800 lbs.! Most of the specimens we have, however, weigh in at around 500 lbs. Just a note: the bigger the boar, the stronger the meat.