An adult wild hog’s stomach holds 5 to 8 quarts of food, and they consume 5% of their whole body weight each day.
Wild hogs are omnivorous opportunists. This is because they eat both plants and animals. They eat lizards, wild mice, bird eggs, rodents, insects, or snakes as well as wild acorns and planted crops.
They frequently adjust to being nocturnal during the summer. Once the summer weather heats up wild hogs begin searching for food at dawn and at dusk in order to avoid the intense rays of the sun.
One reason the heat bothers wild hogs is they do not have sweat glands, so they can not cool off from naturally from the heat. So in the summertime they they sleep during the day’s heat and hunt at night.
Here is a list of some of the plants, fruits, and crops a wild hog consumes:
- Grass
- Wild Onions
- Wild Garlic
- Acorns
- Roots
- Bulbs
- Fungi
- Peaches
- Persimmons
- Wheat
- Oats
- Potatoes
- Cantaloupe
- Rice
- Corn
- Mylo
- Clover
- Watermelon
And these are the animals wild hogs eat:
- Earthworms
- Birds
- Snails
- Carrion
- Deer Fawns
- Insects
- Crayfish
- Reptiles
- Frogs
At times wild hogs will consume tree bark if usual wild foods become limited. Wild hog soil disturbance by aggressive rooting and foraging accelerates the spread of invasive plants. Although it does not happen often, there has been at least one recorded case of a pack of wild boars attacking, killing, and eating an adult, healthy female axis deer.
Now, let’s look at how wild hogs locate their food.
Their snouts have a longish snout that hogs uses to to burrow and scavenge underground for a variety of foods. Wild hogs are regarded as pests in certain locations around the world because they use their rubber-like snouts as miniature digging tools. This in turn ruins farmlands and fields as the hogs consume the flora. Wild boars communicate with one another using a variety of grunts, growls, squeals and chirps. During eating, they tend to grunt a lot.
