Cooktown man Cody Larkin wins annual hog hunt with 129kg boar
The Cooktown Hog Hunt champion has urged better teamwork among Far North Queensland’s biosecurity stakeholders after the annual event wiped out more than 200 pigs in 48 hours.
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The Cooktown Hog Hunt champion has urged better teamwork among Far North Queensland’s biosecurity stakeholders after the annual event wiped out more than 200 pigs in 48 hours.
Cooktown man Cody Larkin won the event after slaying a 129kg boar; it’s gutted weight was 109kg. It’s understood to have set a record for the annual hunt.
Mr Larkin located the boar on a friend’s property in Babinda and hauled the monster 400km back to Cooktown in time for the weigh-in cut-off on Sunday, October 1.
“We arrived at the block about 8pm on the Friday and jumped straight into hunting. It wasn’t until 2am we saw our first pig in the thermal monocular,” Mr Larkin said.
“It was a decent pig but he was too quick for the dogs.
“The next day we got the dogs to work a bit of cane. They flushed the big fella out and two dogs were hot on his tail … pulling him up about 50m from the thick cane where he came from.
“The hours and hours of work that goes into training the dogs definitely paid off. He was a big, old, smart pig that made a mistake, that’s why we caught him.
“We could have easily lost him if he had run the other way back into the cane.”
The event weighed a record total of 9.8 tonnes of pigs, up from 7.5 tonnes in 2022.
More than 380 people participated, also a record.
Mr Larkin said the management of feral pigs depended on hunters.
“If every pig hunter in Australia stopped hunting tomorrow the numbers would explode over the next couple of years and even the government and all their money wouldn’t be able to get on top of it,” he said.
“We need guys like myself out there doing our part as well as the help from parks and wildlife, we just need to work together a bit better.”
Leichhardt MP Warren Entsch said the Queensland Government’s feral pig management program was not effective.
“There’s that many pigs getting slaughtered in that period of time it tells me the state government’s program isn’t working,” Mr Entsch said.
“The state government should be sponsoring something like this.
“Their strategy at the moment is piecemeal.”
Prior to the event commencing, a spokesman for Queensland’s Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, which is responsible for feral pig management, said the Cooktown Hog Hunt was not eligible for funding support.
In response to renewed calls for pig hunting event sponsorships in Queensland, a spokesman said the department had no further comment to make.
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Originally published as Cooktown man Cody Larkin wins annual hog hunt with 129kg boar
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