In Texas you do not need a hunting license to shoot a feral hog on private property with the landowner's permission. There is no season, no bag limit and no possession limit. You may hunt them at night, with a spotlight, with a thermal scope, with night vision, and with a suppressor if you have an approved ATF Form 4. That is the most permissive set of rules attached to any animal in the state, and it exists because Texas has at least three million hogs in 250 of its 254 counties.
Most of what circulates about this is half right, including the bill number. Here is the actual law, what a thermal optic does and does not buy you, and the disease side almost nobody talks about until they are elbow-deep in a boar.
The license exemption, precisely
The change came from Senate Bill 317, not HB 317, effective September 1, 2019. It removed the license requirement for any person — resident or nonresident — to take feral hogs on private property with landowner consent, and it deliberately removed the old references to depredation, so it covers all take rather than only damage control.
What it does not cover gets people in trouble:
- Public land. A hunting license is still required, plus an Annual Public Hunting permit or drawn-hunt rules and whatever the site-specific restrictions are.
- Any other species. The exemption is hogs. If a coyote or a buck walks out, you need the license you did not buy.
- Hunter education. Still required, on private and public land both.
- Landowners charging for access. A hunting lease license is still required.
- Moving live hogs. Illegal in Texas and regulated by the Texas Animal Health Commission. Trapping to relocate is not a legal answer to your hog problem.
Why night hunting is legal, mechanically
This is worth understanding rather than memorizing, because it explains every other permission on the list.
Texas Parks and Wildlife Code §62.004 prohibits hunting protected wild birds and game animals between half an hour after sunset and half an hour before sunrise. TPWD's artificial-light prohibition is likewise written for game animals and birds. Feral hogs are not a protected game animal in Texas. They are classified with nongame and exotic species, so neither provision reaches them.
The result is that no special night permit is required on private land, and TPWD and Texas A&M AgriLife guidance expressly lists spotlights, handheld and rifle-mounted thermal, and night-vision scopes as legal gear. The universal advice — and it is good advice — is to let your local game warden know you will be out. A landowner calling in shots at 2 a.m. is how a legal hunt turns into a long conversation on a county road.
Aircraft, balloons, and drones
The "pork chopper" law, HB 716 in 2011, allows paying landowners or their agents to gun hogs from helicopters under TPWD's Aerial Wildlife Management permit, with a signed and numbered Landowner's Authorization on file before a gunner participates. Sport hunting from aircraft remains illegal under both state law and the federal Airborne Hunting Act. This is depredation management with a permit, not a hunt you buy a ticket for, whatever the marketing says. HB 3535 added hot air balloons in 2017, and in November 2022 the TPW Commission approved AWM permittees using drones to locate hogs at night for ground gunners — shooting from a drone is still illegal. I found no 2025 or 2026 statutory change to any of it.
What a thermal actually does
We have not field-tested these optics across a Texas season and we are not going to pretend otherwise — Venator is a retailer sourcing from 57 vendors, not a test lab. What we can tell you is what the technology does, where the money goes, and what the failure points are for this specific job.
Thermal detects emitted heat rather than amplifying light, which is the whole reason it beats night vision in a mesquite pasture. It sees through smoke and light brush, it works in total darkness with no IR illuminator to spook anything, and it picks a hog out of a treeline at a distance where a spotlight just makes a wall of green eyes. What it does not do is identify. Thermal resolution is low compared to glass, and at range a hog, a calf and a deer are all warm blobs. Every mistaken-identity story in this category starts with somebody shooting at heat.
Practical read on the tiers, from specifications rather than from our own trigger time:
- Detection versus identification. A cheap unit will show you that something is there at 300 yards and will not tell you what. Sensor resolution and lens size are what buy identification distance, and they are most of the price difference.
- Refresh rate matters when hogs run. A low frame rate smears a moving pig. If you are shooting a bailing group rather than a stationary sounder on feed, that is the spec to read.
- Hybrid units are the interesting tier. Something like the the Holosun DRS Thermal runs a red dot and a thermal overlay in one housing, which means the same rifle works in daylight. For a gun that is also your daytime hog and predator gun, that is a real argument.
- Battery and mount discipline. Thermal eats batteries, and a scope that shifts zero when you take it off and put it back on has cost you the whole investment. Torque the rings and leave it alone.
The thermal and night-optic shelf is where we keep the rest, and the honest ordering advice is that glass and a stable mount outrank another sensor upgrade for almost everybody. Worth knowing that the regulatory wind on this technology blows differently for game animals — Idaho just restricted thermal and cell cameras for big game, and we argued in that piece that the fair-chase fight is coming for the rest of us. Nobody is making that argument about hogs, and that distinction is the point: a hog is not managed as game, so the fair-chase frame does not apply to it.
The scale of the problem, with the years attached
| Figure | Value | Source year |
|---|---|---|
| Texas hog population | more than 3 million, in 250 of 254 counties | USDA, 2024 |
| Texas hog population | at least 3.5 million | AgriLife, 2022 |
| Texas crop damage | more than $670 million, plus ~$200 million in control and mitigation | McKee et al., 2024 |
| National damage | roughly $2.5 billion/year | USDA-cited |
You will still see $118.8 million cited for Texas agricultural damage. That figure is old and it is roughly a fifth of the current estimate. If you are making a case to a landowner, use the year.
On toxicants: warfarin-based Kaput Feral Hog Bait is state-registered in Texas as a limited-use pesticide requiring a TDA applicator license, a hog-specific feeder and pre-baiting. Sodium nitrite — HOGGONE — is not approved in the United States; EPA declined registration over bait crumbs poisoning non-target wildlife. Anybody offering you either one casually is offering you a violation.
The part that will actually hurt you
Feral hogs carry more than 30 diseases, and two matter to a person field dressing one. Swine brucellosis, Brucella suis, transmits to humans through cuts and mucous membranes and produces a miserable, recurring illness that is hard to diagnose because doctors do not look for it. Pseudorabies does not infect people but is lethal to dogs.
The Texas prevalence data is sobering and it is old enough to say so: a 2006-07 study of 387 hogs across nine South Texas counties found pseudorabies in 35 percent — up to 73 percent in San Patricio County — and Brucella in one percent.
Agency guidance, and it is not optional:
- Rubber gloves and eye protection, every time. Never bare hands on a hog.
- Disinfect knives, saws and the tailgate with 10 percent bleach.
- Cook to 160°F. Freezing, smoking and curing do not kill Brucella. This is the one people get wrong.
- Keep dogs off the raw carcass.
A sharp knife is part of this and not a slogan — you cut yourself sawing at a tough hide, not slicing with a good edge. Field sharpening is a five-minute skill, and the knives and field-care shelf has the gloves-and-blade end of it.
Two more things agencies have flagged in the last year. CDC researchers detected CWD prions in wild pig tissue from Arkansas and Texas, suggesting scavenging hogs may move prions across the landscape even though pigs appear largely resistant themselves — relevant if you hunt ground we cover in the CWD tracker. And hogs are warm-blooded, which means they can be infested by New World screwworm along with everything else; if you find live maggots in a wound on a fresh hog, that is a call to make, and the reporting numbers are in our screwworm piece.
When to go
Hogs are predominantly nocturnal, and the research says the strongest drivers of movement timing are atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity — stronger than hunting pressure. Extreme heat and extreme cold both suppress movement, and heat pushes activity later into the night. Where abatement pressure is low, daytime and crepuscular activity goes up.
The popular version of that — "they move in daylight after a cold front" — is an extrapolation I could not find published, so treat it as a hypothesis you are testing on your own ground rather than a finding. What is supported is the inverse: in a hot Texas September, the sounder that was hitting your feeder at 8 p.m. in March is hitting it at 1 a.m. now, and that is a thermal problem before it is a marksmanship problem.
Which is the real argument for all of this equipment. Not that it makes hogs easy. That it moves your hunting hours to when the hogs are actually standing there. If you are already out for Texas deer season, the hogs are the reason to stay after dark.