A Shot to the Snout

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Top: Bobby Noell with his collection of hog tools. As a newlywed, he learned the hog business from his father-in-law, a hog farmer near Clearwater, Fla. It was a brief exposure: Bobby’s entire career was spent in the traveling show business industry.Left: A pig snouter and a double-jaw hog ringer.

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What in the world is a pig snouter? A device used to cut a hog's snout to control its rooting. Hogs are not native to North America. When the first Europeans came to this continent, they brought domestic animals from their homelands. Among those animals were horses, cattle, sheep, goats and hogs. In Florida, free-range cattle were a challenge to round up. Each year, Florida cowboys (crackers) began the roundup by driving cattle out of the lowlands, swamps and brush. They cracked long bullwhips to move individual animals out of the brush and assemble them into large herds to drive to market.

Free-range hogs, on the other hand, were wary and elusive. They were much harder to find and round up for butchering or to take to market. Farmers soon learned to fence in an area where hogs could forage. However, with their long, strong snouts, hogs dug holes deep enough to allow their escape under fences. Farmers were then faced with the same problem as before: wild hogs all around, but few in their enclosures.

Farmers tried putting one or more wire rings in the hog's nose, a practice known as ringing. The rings supposedly made the snout tender that hogs could not root aggressively enough to escape their enclosure. Rings worked well in the north, where soil was hard and compacted, but were less effective in sandy soil. Ringed pigs in the south were still able to escape.

So, farmers devised another solution. The new implement was a hinged, plier-shaped apparatus with handles on one end and a clipping or notching mechanism on the other. The device was named a "pig snouter."

According to Bobby Noell, pig snouters were the answer to the problem. Bobby owns one of the museums at the Florida Flywheelers show grounds near Fort Meade. His museum carries the title "Noells' Ark Mymythsonian," a playful reference to both Noah's Ark and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. "It's filled with a conglomerate of wonders from yesterdays past to present from near and far, far away," he says.

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