 face while barking sharply, it can hold the hog “at bay.” Once the bay dogs spring into action, catch dogs—typically bulldogs or pit bulls—are released. Catch dogs grab the bayed pig, usually at the base of the ear, and wrestle it to the ground, holding it until the hunter arrives to finish it off.
Dogs show off their wild-hog skills at bayings, also known as bay trials, which are held most weekends in rural towns across Texas. A wild hog is released in a large pen and one or two dogs attempt to bay it, while spectators cheer. Trophies are awarded in numerous categories; gambling takes the form of paying to “sponsor” a particular dog and then splitting the pot with cosponsors if it wins. Occasionally bayings serve as fund-raisers for community members in need.
Ervin Callaway holds a baying on the third weekend of every month. His pen is down a rutted dirt road off U.S. Route 59 between the east Texas towns of Lufkin and Nacogdoches, and he’s been doing this for 12 years. His son Mike is one of the judges.
“Here’s how it works,” Mike says as a redheaded preteenager preps a red dog. “The dog has two minutes in the pen with a hog and starts with a perfect score of 10. We count off any distractions, a tenth of a point for each. If a dog controls the hog completely with his herding instincts, and stares him down, it’s a perfect bay. If a dog catches a pig, it’s disqualified—we don’t want any of our dogs or hogs tore up.”
“Hog out,” someone shouts, and a black and white hog (its tusks removed) emerges from a chute as two barking dogs are released to charge it. When it tries to move away, a young man uses a plywood shield to funnel it toward the dogs. They stop less than a foot away from the hog and make eye contact, barking until the animal shoots between them toward the other side of the pen. As the dogs close back in, the hog swerves hard into a fence, then bounces off. The smaller dog grabs its tail but is spun around until it lets go. The pig runs into a wallow and sits there. The yellow dog bays and barks, but from maybe three feet away, too far to be effective, and then it loses concentration and backs off. The pig exits through the chute. Neither dog scores well.
Several states, including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and North Carolina, have outlawed bayings in response to protests from animal rights groups. Louisiana bars them except for Uncle Earl’s Hog Dog Trials in Winnfield, the nation’s largest. That five-day event began in 1995 and draws about 10,000 people annually. (The 2010 event was canceled because of disputes among the organizers.)
But bayings continue to take place on a smaller scale elsewhere, as do bloodier hog-catch trials in which dogs attack penned-in wild hogs and wrestle them to the ground. The legality of both events is in dispute, but local authorities tend not to prosecute. “The law in Texas is that it’s illegal for a person to cause one animal to fight another previously wild animal that has been captured,” says Stephan Otto, director of legislative affairs and staff attorney for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, a national group based in northern California. “But the legal definition of words like ‘captured’ and ‘fight’ has never been established. A local prosecutor would have to argue these things, and so far nobody has.”
Brian “Pig Man” Quaca (Tom Quaca’s son) paces the floor of his hunting lodge, waving his arms and free-associating about hogs he has known. There’s the one that rammed his pickup truck; the bluish hog with record-length tusks that he bagged in New Zealand; and the “big ‘un” he blew clean off its feet with a rifle only to see the beast get up and run away. “They’re just so smart, that’s why I love them,” he says. “You can fool deer 50 percent of the time, but hogs’ll win 90 percent of the time.”
Quaca, 38, began rifle hunting when he was 4 years old but switched to bowhunting at age 11. He likes the silence after the shot. “It’s just more primitive to use a bow, way more exciting,” he says. As a teen, he eagerly helped neighbors clear out unwanted hogs. Now he guides hun