Wild Hog Bagging Sadists In Concan, Texas
Part 1: Neal's Lodges & Joe Jimmy's At The Frio River Fest
Every year Neal’s Lodges in Concan, Texas hosts a music festival, Frio River Fest, that contains a lot more to do besides the music. Exploiting live animals for human amusement is always part of the schedule for those who enjoy the sights, sounds, and direct involvement of torturing animals. Prior to the festival, free-living pigs are trapped, captured, and brought to the Joe Jimmy’s location of Neal’s Lodges for the highly disturbing wild hog sacking event. The event is scheduled to take place again this year on March 18th, 2023 at 1 PM. Of course these pigs are going to be murdered, but Neal’s Lodges and Joe Jimmy’s want people to have the opportunity to “play” with the pigs and be entertained by their blatant suffering first.
Teams of two willing humans (children and adults) enter the tiny arena and then two unwilling very young pigs are forced into the arena. The pigs resist going in; they get dragged out, thrown out, or sometimes they are even lifted up by their ears and thrown onto the ground. When the teams get the signal from the flagger they take immediate action to capture the pigs by any means they can (no abusive and painful behavior is off limits). Each round of assaulting the pigs is accompanied by what’s usually pretty upbeat music, such as the two guys who got to torment pigs to “Born In The U.S.A” by Bruce Springsteen. The screams and squeals of the pigs are loud, but not loud enough to drown out the excitement of the crowd.
The goal is to get both pigs into a single burlap feed sack and drag the sack to the yellow circle that’s in the center of the arena in the fastest time possible (a minute or under). After all the teams have gone and the winners have been announced there is a free-for-all grand finale where all the pigs are forced into the arena together to be collectively destroyed. A large group of participants go after the pigs simultaneously and dump the little guys on top of each other into the single sack. I show this grand cruelty finale at the end of my main Frio River Fest Wild Hog Sacking video here and in a separate video clip on my Stop Hog Bagging Now channel.
The participants grab the pigs, tackle the pigs, jump on the pigs, and wrestle the pigs. They pick them up by one or two legs (front or back), by their ears (one or two), around their stomach, by their skin, or around their neck. Thea, the wild hog sacking flagger, participates in the bagging too. I documented her partner Neal picking up a pig by just their ear. Can you imagine all of your body weight being held up by only your ear? I swear humans are absolute masters of cruelty and terrorism.
People come from out-of-state to be part of the madness, such as this team who had one friend from New York and the other friend from California. The announcer made sure to welcome them to the “Real America.” An older couple came out to participate in this event as a way to celebrate their 5-year anniversary. The husband must have weighed at least about 250 pounds and he used his weight as a weapon against the pigs as he tried jumping on top of them as they fled his repeated attacks. At one point one of the pigs stood up on their back feet and leaned their front feet against the wall looking desperately for a way out. While standing against the wall, one of the pig wranglers shoved them violently down to the ground and Mr. Anniversary was finally able to capture the pig he had been trying so hard to get.
Photo and video evidence clearly shows the people who run this event and participate in it don’t have any regard whatsoever for the pigs. The pigs never harm the humans in any way and they clearly demonstrate that they want no part in this event by:
Being trapped in the wild to even make it to the Frio River Fest
Huddling together in fear in their pen
Resisting going into the arena (they are often thrown, dragged, or even picked up by their ears to get into the arena)
Continuously looking for ways out of the arena
Avoiding all physical contact with the humans by running away from them before and after they are grabbed and picked up
Screaming (often at the top of their lungs) and shaking violently as they are picked up or dragged
I campaigned against this event back in early 2019 and in not much time at all Jimmy Joe’s announced via social media that they were cancelling the wild hog sacking event. After they announced the cancellation I stopped posting about the event and moved onto exposing and campaigning against another upcoming pig bagging event in Texas. However, I am embarrassed to admit that not only until a few days ago did I find out that the Rio Frio Fest (what the festival was previously called) did indeed go ahead with the wild hog sacking event in March of 2019 and they’ve continued to do it every year since. I regret trusting that these monsters were actually going to stop doing this event and I regret not doing my due diligence to make sure that they kept their word.
Neal’s Lodges even used my photo to advertise this sadistic event on the events page of their website. This is the same photo that I had used for the petition to stop the event.
There is no reason or excuse for any human to treat pigs in this manner. The pigs trapped and brought in are completely innocent and don’t cause any harm to the humans, even after being provoked and attacked by them. We should learn from other animals how to mind our own business and coexist with each other, but instead most humans try to fit as much damage and destruction into their life as they can. There’s no better future for humans or other animals to look forward to when this is how we behave and what we put up with.
Humans like to discriminate against and vilify these pigs because they “destroy crops” and “destroy land” and “kill livestock” and are “mean” and “invasive.” Last I checked, humans are all of these things and not just a little bit, but a lot.
If people don’t like that wild pigs exist they should remember that it’s the fault of humans that any and all pigs are here in the United States. Pigs were not native here. Humans trafficked them here to be used as a food source and they came to be loved as targets for hunting. Wild pigs have continued to multiply their population by breeding with other wild pigs and breeding with pigs who have escaped their domestication enslavement or been abandoned and left on their own. The only times I’ve heard of pigs attacking humans is when they were either provoked or possibly protecting their babies.
I’ve seen countless wild pigs coexist with “livestock” on sanctuaries without attacking or killing them. I’ve witnessed humans, goats, ducks, chickens, sheep, cows, and pigs all living peacefully with wild hogs at a sanctuary. There is no other species who can compare to how invasive, mean, destructive, and murderous human beings are.
As a Facebook user put it when I last campaigned against wild pig bagging events:
That TX has a feral hog problem now, is due to their own stupidity. In the past many farmers let their pigs roam free until slaughter time and some were never recovered. During economic downturns, many settlers abandoned their homesteads and the pigs were left to fend for themselves. Then the Eurasian wild boars were brought to TX and released for hunting. They bred with free-ranging domestic animals and escapees that had adapted to the wild.
And yet wild hogs were barely more than a curiosity in TX until the 1980s. It's only since then that the population has exploded, and not entirely because of the animals' intelligence, adaptability, and fertility. Hunters found them challenging prey, so wild hog populations were nurtured on ranches that sold hunting leases; some captured hogs were released in other parts of the state. Few purebred Eurasian wild boards ware eft today, but they have hybridized with feral domestic hogs and continue to spread.
I've lived between wild boar for twelve years, and some simple wooden poles with simple electrical wiring kept them off our property.
Whatever damage wild pigs have caused to nature pales in comparison to the damage that humans have wreaked. Not only have humans rendered countless ecosystems on land and in the ocean unlivable, but we’ve wiped out a reported 69% of the wild animal population since just 1970. We would never justify inflicting this type of violence and torture onto humans who are complicit with clearing land, degrading soil, polluting the atmosphere, contaminating water, and causing ocean dead zones- yet somehow this is okay to do to pigs who are just minding their own business and being pigs?
Unfortunately we live in a world where stuff like this can thrive because people can simply get away with it without any consequences. When was the last time you ever heard of a person getting beat up for torturing an animal, or even for torturing millions of animals (an industrial egg “farmer” for example)? Simply put, humans who torture animals generally have nothing to fear.
All I’m able to promote to help stop this event is sharing a petition and publishing a list of contacts for people to reach out to to pressure a once and for all end to this event. But unless someone actually goes to this festival there is no way to know if the wild hog sacking will be canceled or not.
Below I will share contacts and a Google Docs page that gives a rundown of the event and has streaming and download links for photos and videos. I will have a functioning website soon that will contain a page for this event. Please share this article, video footage, the petition, and please consider contacting Jimmy Joe’s and Neal’s Lodges at the very least. Humans should not be able to get away with this insanity in peace and comfort, especially in 2023.
Google Docs Frio River Fest Wild Hog Sacking
Frio River Fest Wild Hog Sacking Investigation Video
Joe Jimmys: https://www.facebook.com/joejimmys/ & 830-232-6118
Neal’s Lodges: https://www.facebook.com/nealslodges & https://www.instagram.com/nealslodges/ & 830-232-6118 & reserve@nealslodges.com
House Pasture Cattle Company (this is the part of the Neal’s Lodges that hosts the musical acts) & 830-232-6580 & housepasturecattleco@gmail.com & www.housepasture.com
Roadhouse Tickets (this is the ticket supplier for the festival) & 512.774.2900 & info@roadhousetickets.com & https://www.roadhousetickets.com/ticket/detail/1050
Visit Uvalde County Texas (Visit Uvalde promotes this event on their website and they may be a sponsor): info@visituvaldecounty.com & 830-232-4310
As far as invasive species go, our species, obviously, is the most invasive species on the planet. Many of the nonhuman "invaders" of nonnative habitats were imported into those habitats by human beings through various routes both intentionally and unintentionally. What this report describes however goes way beyond any form of rational response to problematically invasive hogs. This behavior is correctly described as sadistic, just like the chicken roping contests, cockfighting, dogfighting, conventional rodeos and other staged animal abusing rituals of entertainment. Texas and Wyoming seem particularly proud to cultivate their state identities in terms of their delight in animal subjugation. Once again, great reporting on a violently depraved subcultural amusement.
Thanks for the powerful reporting of a very sad story. And don't punish yourself unfairly for being too trusting in 2019!
It seems that feral hogs in North America are the new big illustration of how environmental ethics and animal protection ethics ("animal rights") can so often collide; they join white-tailed deer, among others, in that unfortunate role. We have read recently that feral hogs are by far the worst and most destructive of invasive species. Who knows?, it could be. But the hogs themselves are morally innocent, and don't deserve the misplaced indignation of the defenders of native wild animals.