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Do many people eat those hogs?
Feral hogs are spreading here in NM. The info the game department put out indicated they carry various diseases. I do not doubt that. But it would seem if you used care in gutting and cleaning, and cooked thoroughly they would be OK.
Jerry
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There have been warnings posted on the different bugs carried by the feral hogs. The best advice is to use the disposable surgical type gloves when gutting, quartering and handling the fresh meat. When cooking, use common sense and bring it up to a proper temp just like any other pork. By the same token, there have been warnings about the bugs found int he stagnant waters back in most of the areas we hunt as well. Some are bad and some are fatal if not dealt with. The worst is one of the types of flesh eating bacteria, so we take time to clean and cover any wounds encountered while in those areas.
As for the hogs being boars or sows, we shoot them all and sort them out when we get to them. I don't sweat the issues of boar verses sow thing one bit, as I have had both that were totally awesome and both that were simply putrid. Either of them, when rutting will be bad, and it is pretty easily detected when you get to them. I usually have quite a bit of feral pork stashed away in the freezer all year long. In fact we just ground up some last weekend into jalapeno flavored pan sausage.
As for their diets, the better tasting ones are in, or around, grain production or in areas which have high concentrations of, peaches, grapes, pecans or similar type fruit or nut bearing foliage. The ones we have found to be worse tasting are the ones which have been in the bottoms eating god knows what. They seem to taste just like that musky moldy river bottom smell you get when around a heavily overgrown swamp.
We have found the best thing is to get them gutted, and on ice as fast as possible. This reduces the gamey taste quite a bit. Also the ones which are shot and drop in their tracks are better than the ones which have been able to run after the shot, been chased and caught by the dogs, or have been in a trap and are stressed. When they crank up the adrenalin, or have time to stress out while in a trap, they build up some kind of funk in the meat that simply will not go away when soaked in an ice chest for a few days.