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Have you ever used a smoker to cook (which is what you are doing) meat or fish (or fruit, cheese or vegetables)?
If not, an important part of the process is "brining" the meat in a solution of kosher salt and water (or salt and sugar and water and.....). This adds time to the whole process as the meat has to sit in the brine for eight to twelve hours depending on the meat and cut.
I have smoked at least 50 shoulders and hams from wild hogs.
I have never heard of "brining" the meat. We never soaked the meat in salt water and our results were spectacularly good.
Love that mesquite wood.
Also, wild hog is absolutely leaner than store-bought pork, that is one reason I like wild hog so much.
As to antibiotics and pork, I had a job 30 years ago which involved going out into the country and interviewing farmers, and other people.
I spent a couple hours one day on a big hog farm in Georgia.
This was where they raised the hogs on concrete-floored pens. Big operation.
The farmer told me that the food was loaded with antibiotics.
He showed me one of the feed bags, sure enough antibiotics were listed as an ingredient. Might have been Tetracycline, I can't recall exactly.
This place had hundreds, if not thousands of hogs, and every time those hogs ate, they ate antibiotics.
The farmer told me that this was the industry standard.
Maybe practices have changed since the late seventies.
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