Field guide
Feral pig
Feral pigs are widespread across both islands and cause serious damage to pasture, crops, native forest and ground-nesting birds. They are one of the animals farmers most often want removed.
Sus scrofa
- Best season
- Year-round; easier in winter when feed concentrates
- When they move
- Night and early morning, especially in warm weather
- Country
- Bush, scrub and farm margins nationwide
- How hard
- Accessible to start, occasionally dangerous to finish.
How they behave, and what that means
Poor eyesight, excellent nose. Wind decides everything. Pigs are found by sign rather than by glassing, and a boar that is cornered rather than fleeing is the one genuine physical risk on this list.
Sign to look for
Rooting and turned ground, muddy wallows, rub marks on trees and fence posts, and a strong sour smell
Tips
- Follow fresh rooting uphill and into the wind.
- Fresh sign is dark and damp; old sign is dry and pale at the edges.
- Never crowd a wounded boar in thick cover.
- If you use dogs, 1080 caution periods matter more here than anywhere.
Where you’ll find them
Rooting, wallows and churned ground are the usual sign. Pigs favour gullies, scrub and bush margins, and move onto pasture at night. Often hunted with dogs, which makes 1080 caution periods especially important.
Dogs and 1080
This is the highest-risk species for dog owners. Pig hunting is dog-intensive and pigs scavenge carcasses in treated areas. Always check the 1080 map and observe the full caution period.
Check 1080 operationsWhy people shoot them
The meat, and the damage they do.
Pork is the point for most people, and a pig is worth carrying out. Landowners also want them gone: pigs root up pasture, damage fencing and take lambs.
Usually a genuine welcome — pigs cost a farm money. Ask about dogs before you bring any, because that is a separate conversation and often the answer is no.
What to shoot a feral pig with
A centrefire with a tough bullet. .270, .308 and .30-06 are the common choices, and .243 with a heavy premium bullet is about as light as anyone sensible goes.
A mature boar carries a shield — layers of cartilage and scar tissue over the shoulders that can be two or three centimetres thick. Light, fast, thin-jacketed bullets break up on it. What you need is a bullet that holds together and reaches the vitals, which is about construction as much as calibre.
What people use
This is the animal people get hurt by. An under-gunned shot on a boar in scrub can leave you with a wounded, angry animal at close range and no second shot. If you hunt pigs with dogs, the dogs are at more risk than you are.
On public conservation land, there is a legal minimum
Only centre fire rifles of calibre .222 Remington or larger may be used for hunting, or crossbows and bows that meet the minimum standard specified by DOC.
Hunting with any shotgun, rimfire rifle, .17 or .22 hornet calibre, air rifle or tracer and incendiary type ammunition is forbidden.
That is DOC’s hunting permit condition, and it applies wherever the permit does. On private land the landowner sets the terms — but the reason for the rule does not change with the fence line. Read the permit conditions
Read further
- Effective game killing — Terminal Ballistics Research Nathan Foster, in Taranaki, has spent decades documenting what bullets actually do to these animals — red deer, tahr, chamois, sika, pigs, goats. If you read one thing about this, read him rather than an overseas chart built around whitetail and elk. He sells books alongside the free knowledge base, which is worth knowing; the research is still the best there is.
- Cartridge-by-cartridge research Already own a rifle? Start here and read about what you have, rather than about what to buy.
- Matching cartridge to game — Hunter-ed The platform US state agencies use for hunter education. Good on the principle.
These are starting points, not prescriptions. Shot placement and bullet construction beat calibre nearly every time, and a rifle you shoot well beats a more powerful one you flinch with — which is an argument for practising more, not for taking less gun.
After the shot
Pork is the one you cook all the way through.
- Standing over it
- Gut it and get the heat out, same as anything else, but keep the carcass out of the dirt — a pig rolls in what a deer walks past.
- Eating it
- Good eating and widely eaten, and a young one is better than an old boar, which can be strong enough that most people give it to the dogs.
Wild pork is never eaten rare. Cook it right through, every cut. Feral pigs also carry leptospirosis, which gets into you through cuts and eyes rather than through the meat — wear gloves to gut one, keep your hands away from your face, and see a doctor about any flu that follows a pig hunt. Pigs are a bovine TB spillover host too, so a carcass that looks wrong inside is one to leave.
Getting it out, butchered, and what the law says about selling it
Going with someone who knows it
Pig country is usually thick — scrub, cutover, gorse and steep bush — and the hunt tends to move fast and downhill once dogs are away. The risk is not exposure or altitude, it is what happens at close quarters at the end.
This is the animal where going with someone is least about the country and most about the work. A boar at bay is dangerous: tusks at knee height, and a dog fight to step into. The knife work, holding a pig, and reading whether a bail is safe to approach are things people are shown, not things they read.
Go with an experienced hunter
Pig hunting is dog hunting for most people here, and dogs take years. Going out with someone who has a good team is how nearly everyone learns, and it is a strong tradition — take the offer if it comes, carry your share, and do what you are told at the bail.
The usual way in is a NZDA branch . Branches run trips, and taking newer hunters out is part of what they are for. It costs a subscription and your share of the petrol.
Hire a guide
Guided pig hunting is offered, mostly on private land with the operator’s own dogs. It is a reasonable way to see how it is done safely if you have no one to go with.
How to check one outAnyone guiding you on public conservation land must hold a DOC concession, or be working under the NZPHGA collective concession as an outfitter member. Ask which of the two it is. A guide who cannot answer that plainly is either working on private land — fine, but then ask whose — or working where they should not be.
DOC on concessions · NZ Professional Hunting Guides Association · their member list
Build up to it yourself
Plenty of people hunt pigs without dogs — spot and stalk on farmland and cutover, which is slower but safer to learn alone and teaches you where pigs actually are. If you want to run dogs eventually, that is a long apprenticeship and it starts by going with someone.
We list no guides, recommend nobody, and take no commission from anyone. That is why the section above gives you a test to apply rather than a name to ring — a recommendation from us would be worth less than a concession you can check.
Helicopters, and what they do to your chances
Helicopters work this animal too, though it shows up less in your day than it does for deer.
WARO — wild animal recovery operations — is commercial helicopter hunting on public conservation land, run under concession from DOC, mostly recovering carcasses for the venison trade. It has been part of New Zealand back country since the 1970s. The national concession covers pigs as well as deer. Pigs are harder to work from the air than goats or deer, so most of the pressure on them is still from the ground and from dogs.
Less than for deer, but the same principle: country that has been worked holds animals that move at night and hold in the thick stuff.
It is not a free-for-all, and the limits are published. DOC’s land schedule sets where recovery may operate, closes some areas to it year-round, and sets exclusion periods when the machines stand down — at a minimum over Christmas, the Roar and Easter. Those periods exist precisely so ground hunters get a clear run, which makes them worth planning around.
Where the detail lives
- DOC: wild animal recovery operations The concession and the land schedule.
- Game Animal Council on WARO Background, and how the system is meant to balance commercial and recreational use.
We cannot tell you whether a particular block was flown last month — that is not published in a form anyone can map, and we would rather say so than let the silence read as an all-clear.
Hunting feral pig on public conservation land
Permits, ballots, restricted areas and which herds are managed how are DOC’s to set, and they change. This is their page for this animal.
DOC: hunting feral pigBefore you go
Seasons, permits, firearms rules and area closures differ by region and by land status, and they change. We don’t publish those — a stale copy of a rule is worse than none. We do map the land itself: boundaries, public conservation land and unformed legal roads. So find the country here, and check the rules with whoever sets them:
And whatever the rules say
Nobody regulates this part, so nobody else will tell you. It is what experienced hunters do without thinking about it.
- Identify your target beyond all doubtNot the shape, not the colour, not the sound, not the movement — the animal. Most people killed hunting in New Zealand are shot by another hunter who was sure. If you are talking yourself into it, that is the answer.
- Assume you are spending the night outOn every trip, including the two-hour one. Carry a survival bag, a warm layer that works wet, food you do not intend to eat and a head torch with spare batteries. People are late constantly and it only matters when they are not carrying this.
- Assume you are getting wetRain, river, or sweat — one of the three, every time. Wool or synthetic next to the skin and never cotton, which stops insulating the moment it is damp and then takes your heat. Keep one dry layer sealed in a bag and do not touch it until you need it.
- Carry a knife, and a way to make fireThe knife is for the animal, and for cutting yourself free of something, and for making a shelter. Fire is what turns a bad night into an uncomfortable one. Both live on you, not in the pack you might put down.
- Carry a PLBThere is no cell coverage where you are going. A personal locator beacon is the difference between a search and a rescue, they can be hired cheaply, and it is the single most useful thing in the pack. Take it out of the pack lid and put it on you.
- If you are unsure about the river, do not cross itDrowning is the other thing that kills hunters here. A river that is up will still be up in the morning, and it comes down faster than you think. Waiting is almost always available; crossing is not always survivable.
- Tell someone, and be honest about the timeNot the time you hope to be out — the time after which something has gone wrong. Then mark yourself back, because a search that starts for somebody sitting in the pub is a search that will not be taken seriously next time.
The firearms rules themselves are in the Firearms Safety Code , and Mountain Safety Council teach the bush side properly. Both are worth an evening before your first trip somewhere new.
Thermals, on public conservation land
Three separate rules that get argued about as though they were one. These are conditions of a DOC hunting permit, so they apply to public conservation land — every line in quotation marks below is DOC’s wording, not ours.
- Permitted: Hand-held, in daylight, to find animals
Hand-held monocular and binocular thermal imaging equipment is permitted for the use of searching and locating wild animals during daylight hours.
- Prohibited: Anything mounted on the rifle
Hunting or discharging a firearm that has thermal imaging, night vision, or spotlight equipment attached.
- Prohibited: After dark, at all
Having a loaded firearm or discharging a firearm during the hours of darkness (half an hour after sunset to half an hour before sunrise).
- Prohibited: Spotlights and any other artificial light
Hunting using spotlights, torches, night vision equipment, vehicle headlights, or any other artificial light source.
Read the permitted wording again: searching and locating. A thermal tells you something warm is there, not what it is. DOC’s own line when they announced the change was that hunters “will then still need to identify their target beyond all doubt before taking their shot”, and that has not moved.
Check the date on whatever you were told. Hand-held thermal only became permitted on 1 June 2024. A lot of confident advice still in circulation predates that — and a lot of people heard “thermals are legal now” and took it to mean the one on the rifle.
On private land there is no DOC permit, so these conditions are not what governs. The landowner sets the terms and every firearms and target-identification rule applies exactly as it does anywhere else. We are not going to tell you more than that, because it would be us guessing about your block.
DOC’s hunting permit conditions · the announcement, 31 May 2024 · if DOC has changed this and we have not, tell us.