Preserving wild hog for dog food

Hello!

Not really sure if this should go in hunting or pets or food preservation, but we are looking for ways to save money on dog food.

We are trapping and killing wild hogs, as we are able, to keep them from destroying our crop fields.

We would like to be able to use this for dog food. Maybe not 100% all hog meat, but every little bit helps and I think it's a lot healthier than dog food. In our area, if you kill wild hogs, it's unlikely they'll be around the trap again for many, many months. So it's not like I can just go out and butcher a hog every time I run out of hog meat. Most likely, I would have a glut of hog meat and then a scarcity.

I could grind the meat and freeze it, but with two dogs, it's a lot of meat and I don't have than much freezer space.

I'm trying to think of other ways of preserving the meat. I have a dehydrator, but it's a small model, so again, won't go very far. I'd love a smoker, but I don't have one.

Curious if anyone has tackled this problem and has any suggestions?

I had a friend who raised rabbits and canned the meat for feeding her dogs. I guess you could do that with pork. I’ve never tried canning, so I don’t know.

Hi Becky,
Could you look at curing parts of it? I have never done it because the climate is not right around here, but people were curing hams and bacon without refrigeration or freezing for hundreds (probably thousands) of years. Some were covered in sugar and other stuff and hung in the shed. Some were packed in salt. Maybe something along those lines could help preserve it for the lean times.

Without the technology and effort of pressure canning, I'd look at traditional meat preservation methods like salting, curing, smoking, and drying.  I'm reminded of the time years ago when I had access to a greenhouse and it got to 130 or more degrees in there in the summer when it was not in use, and I would dry all kinds of stuff in there, on screens with a fan on it.  It was not the usual season to process meat, but we had to do a goat one time and so I cut it all up in little pieces and dried it as an experiment.  That goat shrunk down to fill six quart jars!  I ate on that jerky for years.   Lacking a greenhouse, I've since found the attic space of many houses equally hot and dessicating....I was doing sliced tomatoes batch after batch this past summer and I bet meat would have worked well too.....the only issue is having to butcher the meat in the summer...

My first thought is curing, but all that salt probably isn't great for dogs. I don't think pork dries all that well, because of the fat, but wild hog is pretty lean, so it might be okay? Canning is probably your best bet.

Hi Becky,

Building a smoker is less effort than dressing a hog.  There are many simple designs available on this site and the net in general

Honestly, I don't see how you can do this without some investment infrastructure of some sort. Personally I would be looking at investing in a large chest freezer that can live in some unheated garage or similar for this. Maybe a vacuum, sealer as well.

I suspect that canning a whole hog worth of meat in one session would be an unmanageable task - and you still need to invest considerably in the jars, suitable size pressure cooker etc... and have a large space for storage. I know it can be done, but it would be incompatible with our busy routines here.

I fairly regularly now butcher a whole deer for our own use, package and freeze it. They max out at about 40kg with the skin off. How large are your hogs in comparison? One deer goes quite a long way to filling our small chest freezer. We grind a lot of it to mince, because that is what we use most of when cooking. A good size chest freezer also lets you preserve the bones, which your dogs will love as well.

In your case I would probably work out what 1 day worth of dog food was and package the meat into parcels for 3 days. Freeze those. Then every three days get one package out of the freezer to defrost in the fridge and use over the coming few days.

I don't know what kind of wild hogs you have in your area.

Here in Texas they are just feral hogs so not much difference than eating store bought ham other than maybe a gamey flavor.

The meat can be consumed by humans so okay for pets.

Jerky, canned using a pressure canner, smoked, salted, and even freezing would work.

Making jerky would take up a lot less space then canning or freezing.