General Doc and Col. Peggy just got back from Georgia with a wild story about hog hunters.

Having decided to flee northern winter for a couple of weeks, my sister and brother-in-law were back on Doc’s ancestral farm at Rochelle, a small town in southern Georgia.

Rochelle farmland produces quantities of corn, cotton, pecans, peanuts, watermelons, and also quantities of wild hogs to eat and destroy those crops. Georgia is ranked second only to Florida in numbers of feral hogs.

Peg and Doc were having breakfast at the only restaurant in town when they noticed a table of 14 people, men, women and children, dressed predominantly in camo, which explained the pickup trucks with hunting dogs they had seen parked outside. Doc, never shy, learned they had just arrived from Cleveland, Tenn., to hunt wild hogs on a nearby farm they’d hunted before.

Doc hijacked the hog hunters.

“I said, we got hogs on our farm. We need you to go down there and kill some of them. They jumped on it.”

Doc described the hunters as “great people, working-class people.” Veterans among them were doubly delighted to have a retired Army general inviting them to his farm. One small boy saluted Doc every time he saw him.

“There’s nine of us, family and friends from Tennessee, and five cousins from Ohio this trip,” Don Jacobsen, a leader of the group, told me when I called him later. They’ve been hunting hogs for 30 years.

Doc escorted them to his family farm, and obtained permission for them to hunt across neighbor farms as well. The terrain was winter-dormant cropland and a good-sized swamp, out of which they would have to drag several of the dead hogs, and one stuck truck.

Doc said, “They dropped their dogs off and next thing we had hogs everywhere.” The dogs appeared to him to be coon hounds and pit bull mixed breeds.

Jacobsen later clarified that “The dogs we use are Plotts, a breed with the grit to handle hogs, and other mixed-breed dogs.”

John Plott hounds date back to the mid-1700s in America. They were used to hunt bear in the Carolina mountains, and trace some ancestry to German boar hounds.

“The hogs, the tuskers, they will try to kill the dogs. Big ones can be 250 pounds up,” said Doc. “The small pigs, about 35 pounds, the dogs can kill themselves.”

Doc saw a Facebook post of another local hunt with pictures of two 350-pound monsters. The hunter got them using night-vision equipment, evidence that hardly anybody minds when or how you kill them.

Jacobsen said if there are some who object, they aren’t people with farms. Farmers hate “any hog that ain’t got a hole in it.”

The Tennessee hunters shot with high-powered hunting rifles of various calibers, same as used for deer in Pa. and here in West Virginia. The kills were dragged out of the woods or swamp and thrown into their pickup trucks to be skinned, cut up and the meat put on ice in coolers. Piglet carcasses were left for the coyotes.

One big sow had 11 fetal piglets in her. Doc said a sow can produce three litters a year. No wonder they can’t eradicate wild hogs.

At one memorable point on this hunt the dogs flushed out “three sows and about 20 little pigs. They were just running around like ants,” Jacobsen said. Some piglets took to the swamp. “You wouldn’t think those things could swim so fast.”

The next day the group hunted their original farm destination, but the third day “they came back to our place where the hogs were more plentiful,” Doc said.

The Tennessee hunters killed 26 hogs on this trip, along with untold numbers of piglets.

Wild hogs, a problem throughout the South, are mainly descended from pigs brought in by settlers in the 1500s. They root up crops, destroy the environment and displace native species, doing an estimated billion and a half dollars in crop damage each year. They are hunted for sport and for extermination year-round with minimal regulation. Doc is a bird hunter, but had seen hog hunts before, in Texas, where they chased them in helicopters and shot them with shotguns.

Winter is the time to hunt hogs for meat. “First frost in November on is hog kill time. Everybody down here got a freezer full of sausage,” Doc said.

Hog meat is the first ingredient in many Southern recipes. Pickled pig’s feet are tasty, they say. Doc was once served fried pork brains with eggs for breakfast. They looked and tasted like sausage.

Then there are chitlins, intestines that are “turned inside out, scraped clean, breaded with flour or corn meal, and fried in hot oil.” When Doc was young, around the Truman administration, “Guys would get together and have a chitlins supper. It was a big deal, and included a lot of drinking.” A traditional Brunswick stew of meat and vegetables, he said, begins with boiling a hog’s head whole in an iron kettle.

Forgive me if you can’t get those images out of your head the next time a tasty pork dish is set before you.

(Fred Miller’s third book, “A Dead Carp on Shadyside Ave.” is available locally at Calcutta Giant Eagle, Pottery City Antique Mall, Museum of Ceramics, Frank’s Pastries, Davis Bros. pharmacies and the Old Ft. Steuben gift shop.)