How high's the water, Mama?

[AcornHunter]

Its temperature, that is.

I'm finding it very difficult to scrape the hair off young feral pigs, 35-50 pound range.  It's much more laborious than how I remember the scraping of domestic hogs was, albeit then I was an interested lad mostly watching.

I tried scraping one a couple of Octobers ago and ended up skinning it.  I tried again Thursday and ended up moving to the skinning gambrel with no more than a handful of bristle accumulated beside the scraping table.  The pig had something that seemed like guard hairs that were nearly impossible to free up.

You reckon, it's the scraper, the operator (he's not of the microwave generation), the water temp, something I'm completely missing, or all of the above?

I've pretty well boiled it down to genetics:  the swines', not Mama's and mine.

[kodiakisland]

Young ones usually aren't too bad.  They do have tougher hair than farm raised for sure.