Hunting pigs with solid slugs in a shotgun

Q: Most of my pig shooting is done in areas where there are thick patches of Sifton bush or scrub where ranges are short — from 10 to 20 metres. 

I don’t have a short rifle like a lever-action carbine, but I do own a repeating shotgun which I’ve been using with buckshot with reasonable success. 

A lot of the time the buck shot is deflected by foliage, let alone scrub, so that only one or two pellets hit the pig — if I’m lucky. 

So I’ve decided to give rifled slugs a go in the hope they will buck brush better. 

I’d like your opinion about how far they’ll shoot and any other information you can give me about shotgun slugs. 

Will they work all right and not damage my gun’s full-choke barrel? 

Jack Charles

A: Years ago I tinkered with these large globules of lead and just for the hell of it, I fired a series of shots at 50 and 100 metres. The shotgun was a Mossberg pump-action with modified barrel 28” (71cm) in length with a raised vent rib but no rear sight. I attached a low-range variable power scope to it. 

Once I got the gun sighted in I found I could keep all my shots inside a bullseye the size of a tea cup at 50m. 

You may think it would be stretching things to shoot any farther, but even at 100m the slug shot groups the size of a dinner plate and did not tumble. It cannot, since all the weight is up front, hence the light tail cannot get ahead of the heavier nose. 

However, this doesn’t mean a lot of wobble doesn’t take place. It does. And the ragged holes in the target attest to this fact. 

However, it sounds as if you have no sound reason to shoot at pigs beyond 50 metres. 

Within this range you can be sure of hitting the vital area of a pig almost every shot. 

It is usually said that slugs ought to be fired out of an improved-cylinder barrel which, in a 12-gauge, has only 0.76mm (.003”) of choke. This is supposed to be necessary so the big hunk of soft lead won’t be cramped when it passes through the choke. 

But I have measured a good many slugs and the average diameter is 17.17mm (.676”). The 12ga full cylinder is 18.52mm (.729”), so anyone who worries about a tight fit is wasting their time. 

I have shot slugs in every choke and have never been able to find one that is better than the Brenneke. 

The best accuracy with slugs is gained with shotguns which engage the slug with a portion of rifling in the barrel about 18cm back from the muzzle, with shallow lands which gives the slug a slight spin. 

Even a slug will be deflected if it hits the thick branch of a bush, but it will plough through foliage that would stop buckshot.