Successful driven hunt in short sleeves!

In the middle of September a group of 10 Danish hunters travelled to southern Turkey with Diana Hunting Tours to take part in a driven hunt. While there is nothing unusual with going on a driven hunt in Turkey, what was different was the date, normally Turkish driven hunts are arranged during the late autumn and the winter. The main purpose of arranging a driven hunt in September was to experience the excitement of a driven hunt in Turkey, where you can shoot some of the world’s biggest boars, at a time of year when the weather in the mountains here is like a good Danish summer day, far from the snow and the mud which is an unavoidable part of hunting in winter. However the big question was whether we could find the boars at this time of year? It turned out we could! Diana Hunting Tours partners in Turkey had done a great job in preparing the area and feeding the boars, so when the Danish group arrived, they were received by a team of enthusiastic beaters and focused dog handlers with their specially trained dogs.

It also turned out that the group experienced the good weather they were hoping for, as all 5 hunting days were sunny, with temperatures of between 26 and 30 degrees Celsius!

A monster in the drive

From the very first drive good wild boar began to appear, and the first “keilers” of over 100kg were soon in the bag. However these were small game in comparison with the boar that turned up in a drive on the second day, and fell to a well aimed shot. As it disappeared down a mountainside immediately after it had been hit, no-one knew exactly HOW big it was until the end of the day, when 6 beaters after 6 hours of hard work, managed to retrieve this huge boar. It was a real monster! It turned out to weigh 325kg and bore enormous tusks that were later measured at 27.5cm! One of the advantages of a driven hunt in Turkey is that it includes an unlimited bag of wild boar, regardless of number and size. That meant that Benny, the lucky hunter who shot this huge beast, didn’t have to pay one penny extra to shoot the boar of a lifetime! Had the hunt taken place in Hungary for example, the boar would have entailed having to pay a considerable trophy fee.

Repeating our success in 2020

This year the group of 10 hunters shot a total of 32 boars. While this is actually a good result here, we believe it can be bettered next year. We could see during the first couple of days that the Turkish hunt organisers first needed to decode the behaviour of the boars, which is different during the warmer months of the year than in the winter. But as soon as they cracked the code, then the hunt really began to pick-up the pace. Now with the experience they have gained from this years hunt, they will know precisely how to tackle this hunt next year.