What's the cheapest hog and wild boar hunting outfitter in Tennessee?

The $150 hunt isn't the same product as the $2,900 one

Twenty-one packages, seven outfitters, one animal, spread across Grandview, Crossville, Clarkrange, Jamestown and Monterey on the Cumberland Plateau. But "cheapest" is doing a lot of work on this list. Triple C's $150 package is self-guided day access shared with turkey: you find the hog yourself, on your own, with no guide and no bed included. Most of the rest of the list is a different product, with a guide, a lodge and meals attached to the hunt. Standing Rock runs $500 for a one-night hunt and $950 for two nights. Wilderness and Bridgecreek charge $750 and $825 per hog taken, guided. Standing Rock's guided day hunt is $900. A bed and a guide cost more than a gate fee. That's not a markup; it's a longer list of what's included.

Why the top-ranked outfitter isn't the cheapest one

The ranking above leads with Spartan Hunting Preserve, whose cheapest package is $2,900, and not because it's cheap. The ranking is a trust score, not a price sort: a blend of Google's star rating and how many hunters backed it up, so a thin 5.0 doesn't outrank a 5.0 with 1,944 reviews behind it. Cheapest and most-trusted are two different questions. For the price question, read the table above it: $150–$5,900 across the 21 packages, with a $1,495 median among the 9 priced in a directly comparable rate. The rest are either priced per animal taken, a real cost, just not a flat one to average, or not yet priced at all. One package tops that whole range: Spartan's own boar-and-fallow-buck combo hunt, at $5,900.

The license costs more than the cheap hunt

Tennessee sets no season and no bag limit on wild hogs. TWRA stopped managing them as a game animal in 2011 and now treats them as a destructive species instead. Landowners without an exemption may "shoot wild hogs without limit, year-round, during daylight hours, with any weapon and ammunition legal for taking big and small game". That's why every outfitter on this page can book a hunt in any month, and why this page carries no season table: there's no season to show.

It's not, though, a reason to skip the license. A nonresident still needs Tennessee's standard hunting license to hunt on any of these properties: $214 for seven days, or $305 for the year, at this year's TWRA fee schedule. Add the 7-day license to the $150 day hunt and the trip runs $364 before gas, ammunition, or a room for the night. The cheapest hunt and the cheapest trip are different numbers: on the low end of this list, the license alone costs more than the hunt does.

What the price actually buys

Lodging shows up on 9 of every 10 packages here that list what's included at all. A guide, on 8 of 10. Meals are on about two-thirds, meat processing a bit over half. The packages missing both lodging and a guide, Triple C's day access among them, sit at the bottom of the price list for a real, checkable reason. They're a different hunt, not the same hunt discounted.

The full license schedule, the legal weapons, and the field rules that apply once a hunt is combined with a regulated species like ram or fallow deer (common at these same outfitters) are below, along with where to hunt deer, turkey or buffalo in Tennessee instead.