From the trap to your freezer
How Texas feral hogs become the wild boar meat we sell — and why live capture and inspection matter.
Photo: USDA, public domain
1. Truly wild Texas hogs
Every hog we process is a feral hog that lived free on Texas land — pastures, river bottoms, brush country and crop fields. They are not raised on a farm, not fed for market and not given hormones or antibiotics. What they eat is what they root up: acorns and pecans, roots, grubs, grasses, and too often a farmer's corn, peanuts or sorghum.
Wild hogs are an invasive species in Texas. Removing them protects crops, pastures, wildlife habitat and water quality, and turning them into food means the animal is not wasted.
2. Live capture
The meat we sell for people comes only from hogs that arrive at our facilities alive. Trappers working on ranches and farms catch whole sounders in corral and box traps and bring them to the Rockin M Pig Pen, our holding facility in Hubbard. Texas tightly controls where live feral hogs can go — straight to slaughter or to an authorized holding facility — and we keep the records the state requires for every animal we receive.
Why live? Because in the United States a hog can only be sold as meat for people if it is inspected alive before slaughter. A hog shot in the field can never pass that inspection, no matter how carefully it was handled. That is why hunter-harvested hogs follow a separate path into pet food.
3. Inspection before and after slaughter
At the plant, each hog is examined alive for signs of illness or injury. After slaughter the carcass and organs are examined again — the heart, lungs, liver and lymph nodes reveal disease that the muscle does not. Only carcasses that pass both checks continue to processing.
4. A wild-boar-only plant
Our plant in Hubbard processes wild boar and nothing else. That keeps the process focused: our crew knows how a lean, muscular wild hog breaks down, and how its cuts differ from those of a farm pig. Carcasses are chilled, then cut by hand into the retail and foodservice cuts in our catalog.
5. Sealed and frozen the same day
Cuts are trimmed, vacuum sealed, labeled and frozen. Freezing quickly locks in quality and makes nationwide shipping possible: everything leaves the plant frozen solid in an insulated cooler with dry ice. How we ship.
Where hunter-harvested hogs go
Licensed hunters bring field-dressed hogs to the plant under strict field-dressing rules — gutted within 30 minutes, organs left on for inspection, delivered within six hours. Those carcasses are checked and processed for pet food, never for the meat we sell for people.