So I thought I'd put it out and see what others may think a good set up would be.
Everybody is going to have their own answer due to preferences. Since this is a hog problem (versus hunting eating hogs), then the goal is to kill as many as possible as efficiently as possible, ideally while still trying to kill the hogs very quickly, as you would a deer, antelope, bear, etc.
So ideally, this will be a semi-auto rifle. AR platforms tend to dominate the the field for those actively involved in trying to keep hog numbers down.
When it comes to killing, there isn't such a thing as too much gun, unless of course you don't like a lot of recoil or you want to make quick followup shots, then too much gun can be a problem. For many folks, carrying an extra few ounces is beyond their capabilities, so AR15 platform over AR10. Personally, I know of only one guy that shoots a .308 AR10 like I shoot my AR15. The dude is a big, muscular firearm. Smaller people can do it as well, like Jerry Miculek, but for the most part people can't run an AR10 as well as they run an AR15 in typical calibers. You can get AR15s in calibers like .458 Socom, .450 Bushmaster, and .50 Beowulf that WILL have a lot more recoil, but here I am referring to lesser calibers like .223, 6.5 Grendel, 6.8 SPC, .300 BO, 7.62x39.
Let's say your buddy is shooting a smaller, lighter recoiling caliber like the 6.8 SPC. One of the best ways to offset the caliber deficit is by using good expanding and/or fragmenting ammo. It has been my experience helping guide hunts that people who cheap out on ammo end up shooting a lot more to down hogs, lose more hogs, have longer tracks on hogs, and have fewer one shot DRT kills, and in general, end up spending more on ammo than the guys that use more expensive bullets that properly expand and/or fragment. By cheap out, I mean going with FMJ or some generic match bullet they found online somewhere. With that said, there is some inexpensive foreign ammo I have seen folks use that is softpoint that works as well as our softpoint ammo and if you like softpoint performance, then that may be the way to go, but I like more tissue destruction than what the typical softpoint does. Some of my favorite rounds are those that fragment. I have had excellent success with Federal Speer TNT 90 gr VARMINT ammo. Varmint ammo isn't supposed to work on 200 and 300 lb hogs, but in 6.5 Grendel, it does very well. I have probably killed several hundred hogs with it. Another good one with Hornady SST 123 gr. bullets (hunted exclusively with these for several years) that tend to fragment and expand. Both of these do a lot of damage, pollute a lot of meat, but are excellent hog killers. These are just examples I have found to up my chances for quick kills given that I shoot 6.5 Grendel. There are several others.
Personally, I don't advocate the .223 for hunting hogs. I have hunted hogs with it and will hunt with it again, no doubt, but more like for sniping hogs versus trying to kill as many as possible out of a sounder. When you go smaller in caliber and/or reduced velocity, then your shots tend to need to be more precise in getting the job done. He can quickly and effectively kill hogs with a .22 subsonic, but the bullet only has a very limited number of shot locations on the hog to make that possible.
If he is just going to set up a feeder in a sendero and shoot hogs out from under the feeder, then he probably doesn't need a semi-auto rifle. He can snipe them with a single shot .557 T-Rex. That is because he isn't likely to get too many quick followups in such a situation. I have my feeders in a clearing, but in less than a few seconds, hogs, deer, raccoons, and opossums formerly present can be gone. About the only times I get followup shots at my feeders is when one of the hogs stops before making it into the woods.
300BO subsonic at 200 is suboptimal on anything more than the piglets.
I know of 4 people that went with 300 BO for the subsonic option. NONE of them hunt hogs subsonically on a regular basis. Why? The bullets simply don't kill as well when you take 1500-2300 fps away from them. PLUS, and this is huge, shooting subsonic is about like shooting long range in terms of drop. Unlike supersonic ammo, if you zero at 25 yards, you aren't apt to be zero'd at 200 or 100. Let's say you are shooting a 208 gr AMAX bullet at 1100 fps. With a 25 yd zero, you are down nearly 4" at 100 yards. At 125 you will be nearly 7" low and by 150 yards, will likely miss the hog underneath with more being more than 10" low at that point. If you shoot subsonic, then count on placing your shots much better and that drop will be a factor at much shorter distances than for full power supersonic ammo. In other words, being subsonic means introducing complexity to your situation.
Even worse is that if dealing with sounders, unless the guy is just amazing, shots on running hogs are going to be far less than precise and he won't have much benefit from the velocity to help do the damage needed for a poor shot to be decent. Contrary to popular belief, even a poor shot can be good sometimes. I have managed to shoot out the heart of a hog with a Texas Heart Shot. The bullet had over 20" of penetration, had expanded by the time it passed through the heart (no doubt, much sooner). For clarification, the hog had already been wounded and was running away. My shot was an attempt to stop the hog to finish it hog with another shot after that, which turned out to not be needed.
Suppressors are good. It has been my experience that they are NOT a game changer when it comes to hunting the animals except in terms of hearing safety. If hogs have been shot at before or shot at before with suppressed rifles, they will run away just as fast than if you weren't using a suppressed rifle. For the few hogs that have never encountered hunters previously, a suppressor might result in them not running as far or as fast, but after another shot or two, that grace period ends. Of course, that can happen with unsuppressed rifles as well. If the hogs don't run from the report, they will run from the sound of the impact, which is still quite loud.
Most rifle suppressor will dampen the noise pressure by about 30 db, give or take about 5 db. That will get your supersonic rifle down to about 130-145 db. That is still plenty loud. There are a lot of suppressors on the market that perform fairly well, but vary widely in price. You may pay extra for lighter weight, special materials, and whatnot. If you go with something over 30 caliber, like .458 Socom, your suppressor may be more expensive. The easy way is to get a 30 cal suppressor and shoot 308 or less in it. I shoot 6.5 Grendel from my 30 cal can.
I don't know much about thermal sights but I know they can get quite pricey. The owner of my LGS hunts coyotes with one that cost $9000. I know they can be had for much less but a good one is going to be up there.
I am involved in some of the testing of thermals for a couple of companies. Thermals have undergone some changes over the last few years, nothing major until this year, but won't apply here (I-Ray USA's $18K RICO HD RS75). You can find a good $5K 640 resolution thermal that will get you out to 300 yards, though most people don't shoot over 100. I have hunted with folks that don't like to be more than 50 yards away before the shooting starts. You can get a functional 384 resolution thermal that will get you out to 200 yards and certainly farther. As distance increases and the relative number of pixels on a target decreases as the size of the target decreases, the farther away the animal, the more difficult the identification. More is better than less, but you can be extremely functional and kill a lot of hogs with a 384 resolution thermal scope. Oh, and my distances here are conservative, though the comment about difficulty increasing with distance is accurate.
Here are two scopes side by side, one is a 640 that I did not fine tune and the other is a 384 scope that my hunting partner did fine tune that the image actually looks a little better than the 640...in this case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-W49jOIpE0
All thermal optics, given that they are electrical appliances, are doomed to fail. I have owned thermal from several different companies and dealt with their customer service in every case. That is just reality. In my experience ATN and FLIR were the absolute worst to deal with. ATN has some of the least expensive thermal optics available given all the features they offer, though much of which you won't use, LOL. When they work, they work well. When it comes to customer service, you may be okay or treated like dirt. Pulsar, AGM, Bering Optics, Trijicon, and Armasight all have customer service that is considered quite good and I have used all but AGM (haven't owned one, yet). I assume InfiRay and I-Ray USA to be excellent as well as I have not heard any complaints about CS on those brands. The newest recent player I have found is Fusion Thermal out of Louisiana. I don't know much about their products or CS, but hope to have one in my hands before the end of the year.
Like your buddy, Willie, I hunt with a $9k thermal sight, a Trijicon IR Hunter MKIII 60mm 4.5x 640 resolution. This the older style (new is 3.5x, IIRC). My spotting scope is the partner IR Patrol M250XR 60mm 4.5x 640 resolution. If I had it to do over today with today's options, I would be going with a scope that is less pricey and has a better image over a wider variety of environmental circumstances. Price does not have a 1:1 correlation with performance in thermal optics between brands.
Digital night vision can be had for a fraction of the price. With good IR illumination you can see for a few hundred yards.
Excellent suggestion. Pulsar, ATN, Sightmark, and soon Bering Optics will have digital NV players. The Pulsars are a good product, but way too expensive for their capabilities. ATN is ATN (see above and steer clear). Sightmark makes the Wraith and Mini Wraith in various configurations. Get the most expensive 4k version if you go this route. It will be worth the extra money. I think the most expensive Wraith is the mini in 4k. It is a 2x native magnification optic, but with 4k, can zoom quite a bit before the picture deteriorates significantly. The really cool thing about digital NV is that you can use it in the day time without frying the sensor (unlike traditional NV that can fail due to bright light). I don't like the regular Wraith which is bigger and heavier and has more native magnification, but has a very narrow FOV. That is why I would suggest the mini (smaller, lighter, still plenty of zoom, better FOV).
The IR illuminator (flashlight) that comes with most digital NV scopes is pretty mediocre and will give you 100-300 yards of performance. You can spend a couple or three hundred bucks on a super illuminator like a Coyote Cannon and get better range. You WILL NEED the IR illuminator on all but the brightest of nights. Most digital NV weapon sights do okay in dusk/dawn situations, but do not do well with partial moons or star light.
With that said, check out my hunting partner attempting his longest shot ever on a coyote with the Sightmark Wraith 4k (full size). I really like this video. It starts after sunset and I think he took his shot just before the end of legal (for deer) hunting hours, dusk, with no supplemental IR illumination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMZYnyaAnqw
The problem with digital NV or traditional NV when you are using in IR illuminator is that objects in the foreground tend to be overilluminated. So if you have trees branches between and your quarry, maybe just above or to the side as you view your quarry, they will get over illuminated and that can tremendously cut your effective range. In a nice open field that is well grazed like where my hunting partner was shooting, that would be ideal.
This is a terrible video, but illustrates the problems of IR illuminators and overillumination of things like foliage in the foreground to the detriment of things farther back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h28vbH2syTo
I would strongly suggest that if going with Digital NV on the rifle (and I hunted like this for 3 years), then he 'needs' a thermal spotter. It does not have to be amazing or terribly expensive if he just needs to know animals are out there. I will still suggest not going with anything under 320 or 384 resolution. Newer version of 320/384 scopes today look a lot better than the little 320 res FLIR Scout I was using 9 years ago and they now cost about half as much and have more features.
NOTE: On electro-optics, there will be a recoil rating. Some are .308 rated. Some are .375HH rated. Some are 300 Win Mag rated, and some may tell you the rating in joules for which you have to figure out how many joules your caliber/load are and if your optic will handle it. Sort of like with hearing damage, recoil damage to electronics is cumulative over time and does not self repair. I will make up these numbers for argument sake. Let's say you can get 50k shots out of a given optic if you are firing .223, but it may only last 30k shots with a .308 and 15k shots with a .300 Win mag even though it is rated for .300 Win Mag. Put another way, your car will last longer if you drive on nice smooth roads all the time as opposed to driving over a road that is rutted, potholed hell like you might expect to find in a Minneapolis spring after a brutal winter. The harder your gear is treated, the more likely it is to fail.
