Oklahoma deer and hog rifles

One animal has a sixteen-day gun season and a bag limit. The other has neither. Here is what works on both, and what the rules say.

Whitetails live in all 77 counties, and rifle season is the closest thing the state has to a shared holiday. Feral hogs are the opposite story: an invasive pest found in nearly every county, tearing up wheat, peanuts, hay meadows and creek bottoms, and landowners want them gone. A lot of Oklahoma hunters now own one rifle for each job, or one rifle that does both.

General information, not legal advice or an official summary. Seasons, legal firearms, bag limits and hunter-orange rules are set by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation and reprinted every year. Work from the current Oklahoma Hunting Regulations at wildlifedepartment.com, not from this page.

The deer seasons

• Archery opens October 1 and runs into mid-January.
• Youth deer gun is a weekend in October.
• Muzzleloader is nine days starting the fourth Saturday of October.
• Deer gun opens the Saturday before Thanksgiving and runs sixteen days.
• Holiday antlerless gun season comes in late December in the zones that are open.

That is the long-standing pattern. The exact dates, the antlerless zones and the combined season limit are in each year's regulations. Most deer hunting here is on private land, so the first step is permission or a lease. ODWC's wildlife management areas are the public option, and several of the best are controlled hunts you apply for in the spring.

Matching the rifle to the country

West of I-35 the shots stretch out over wheat, CRP grass and mesquite pasture, and a flat-shooting .270, 6.5 Creedmoor or .308 with a decent scope is the tool. In the Cross Timbers and the Ouachita foothills you are hunting oak flats and cedar thickets from a ladder stand, shots are inside a hundred yards, and a handy .30-30 lever gun or a short-barreled .308 carries better and points faster. Nothing in this state needs a magnum.

Feral hogs

Hogs are not game animals in Oklahoma. They are classed as feral swine, and two agencies share them: the Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry handles transport, holding facilities and sporting facilities under the Feral Swine Control Act (2 O.S. 6-601 et seq.), and ODWC sets the rules for taking them on its areas and during its seasons.

• Private land: year-round, no bag limit, with the landowner's permission. This is where nearly all hog hunting happens.
• During deer gun and muzzleloader seasons, license and hunter-orange rules can apply to anyone carrying a rifle afield, hogs or not. Read that section before a November hog hunt.
• Night shooting on private land is allowed under conditions the legislature has relaxed over the last several years. Confirm the current rule with your game warden, and tell the neighbors.
• Public land: generally only during an open season with that season's legal methods, daylight only, and some areas are closed to it.
• Live hogs: do not move them. It is regulated, and it is how they spread.

A hog rifle

Hogs are tough, low to the ground and usually moving, often in a group. That argues for a semi-automatic, a cartridge with more weight than 5.56, and an optic that works at dusk. A .308 AR-10 is the heavy answer. An AR-15 in 6.5 Grendel, 6.8 SPC, .300 Blackout or .350 Legend is lighter and handier in a side-by-side. Plenty of hogs are killed with 5.56 too, with a bonded or monolithic bullet placed forward, on the shoulder and not behind it as you would on a deer. Oklahoma puts no limit on magazine capacity for rifle ownership, and standard magazines ship here. Hunting-specific limits are a separate question, answered in the ODWC legal-means section.

Every rifle on this page ships to the Oklahoma FFL dealer you name at checkout. Ammunition ships to your door.