fbpx

Hunting Hybrids

By Lindsay Jamieson

From my position, I saw this boar trotting across a ridge, just below the skyline so the ridge provided a perfect backstop. The boar was about 80 meters away and I swung the 9.3 Mauser while giving it a bit of lead with the red dot sight that I was using.  When I fired, the pig dropped immediately and started to roll down the hill.  I gave it a quick follow-up shot as it rolled, but it soon got jammed against a small tree and never moved again.

I was using ammunition that I have never fired in this rifle before. A friend had got hold of a couple of hundred rounds of 1950s factory Kynoch. This would be a 286 gr bullet at about 2,400 fps. That old factory Kynoch certainly did the job, I guess that the first shot killed it outright. As is customary in driven hunts, the beaters collected all the carcasses for slaughter, as a result, I never did find where the point of impact was and how that old Kynoch bullets performed.

This boar that I hunted during a drive in 2015 in Croatia will be the result of  many generations of interbred boar. Note the long, shaggy coat and tusks of a Wild Boar, but the markings of a domestic pig due to residue in the gene pool. 

When the war in Kosovo started in 1998 a lot of farmers turned their livestock loose and went off to war. The pigs interbred with the Wild Boar in the forests, and nowadays  concession owners are very pleased to see interbred pigs removed from the gene pool.

On a driven hunt in the Croatian forests with my 9.3×62 Mauser