Hog Blog

What feels like about 10 times throughout this wild pig chase, I've gotten a story almost finished and then I get a phone call.

Thursday was no different.

Got started working early on Thursday and was planning on going home early that night. I had big plans to clean out my truck. That got scrapped.

This caller said (basically): That was my pig. He wasn't wild.

And the night was not the same.

Go on over to The Star to read the full story.

Though you might want to see this ...

I really did. I thought it was dead -- not the pig (I know it's dead), but the story. That's, I guess, why I haven't been posting as heavily as I did at first.

Now I know, this story is far from dead. IT LIVES!!

Yesterday, out of nowhere, Stinky Journalism.com claimed to have debunked the story (they attacked it basically from the Photoshop end), and it rose from the dead.

I worked on that (what seemed like) all day Tuesday until I got a pleasant surprise. It was a phone call from the Stones saying they were in (of all places) Oxford. We went and took the pictures of the skull you might have saw in Wednesday's Star.

Now, the story has taken a completely different angle. The good folks at Alabama Department of Conservation are looking into the story. They hope to find out a few different things. You can read my story in Thursday morning's Star.

Bran

P.S. -- Through the glory of Tivo (if you don't have it, you should), it captured the documentary of Hogzilla, and I watched it Tuesday night. I ate a ham sandwich while enjoying the piece fine cinema.

It's been a few days since the big pig story hit the presses, and it's funny how much people have latched on to it.

Bored out of my mind, I was up on the computer looking around on the Web and found this ... the monster pig represented the second- and fourth-most searched for items on google.com on May 25. What was No. 1? Fatemeh Angela Harkness. She's the ex-stripper who embezzled $1 million to start up a NASCAR team.

Strippers and pigs ... Sound like a country music song just begging to be written.

Here's other places the story has turned up.

On Fox News (They got it wrong. They said it was killed in Montgomery.)



Urban Legends

Even across the pond ... from "Scotland on Sunday"

Another phone call, and this was the best one I had all day.

Jerry Cunningham, of Jerry's Taxidermy, called to say he does in fact have the hog and it's really, really big.

He was there to see it soon after it's kill. He also "caped out" the hog, removing the hide for the process of mounting it, in which is planned to be a shoulder mount.

To help make the form on which the animal will be mounted, Cunningham had to take accurate measurements of the beast. Here they are:

Around the head (across the ears): 54 inches.
Around the shoulders: 74 inches.
Length of snout (from eyes to nose): 11 inches.

Just for a gauge, a basketball is 30.7 inches around.

As it's currently 8:11 and I just got off the phone with Cunningham, I'll planning to go see it for myself on Wednesday afternoon. I would do it sooner, but Wednesday morning I'll be at the Southeastern Conference baseball tournament in Hoover to watch Alabama play (drumroll, please) the Arkansas Razorbacks.

By Thursday I'm sure I'll be pigged out.

Since my last posts, I've been back in the office with the phone glued to my ear.

I've spoken with biologists at Auburn University, game wardens, and even the father of the young boy who killed the monster pig.

The last person I'm currently looking for is the taxidermist, who the father can't remember the name for. He's someone in this neck of the woods.

I'm out to find it.

This just in: I found someone who actually saw the hog.

His words: "It looked like an angus bull laying there."

More from him later.

Posted on behalf of Bran, who's having connectivity issues in the wilds of Clay County:

This is what I've seen so far - lots of dirt roads. This is what I've not seen - wild boars and Nextel phone towers.

I did get to talk to the good folks at the Farmer's Co-op in Lineville where the super swine was weighed. But there was a slight problem in the verification
process - nobody I spoke with was there when the pig was weighed.

Also, the owner of the plantation where the hog was killed is currently in Canada on a hunt, so that may take a little bit of doing to get in touch with him.

As for now? Well, I have heard a bit of a rumor about how the strain of super pigs came to be in Delta. I'm off now to see how much I can find out about that.

I think I might try the Piggly Wiggly.

While it seems to be totally unrelated, Hogzilla: The Movie is filming right now over in Georgia.

Please do not get this confused with National Geographic documentary.

Before I head off to Delta, I'll leave you with a little material to read up on Hogzilla. According to who you believe, he was somewhere between 800 to 1,000 pounds.

National Geographic did a documentary on the legend; They said he was only about 800 pounds.
Obviously, the guy who killed it said it was, well, what he said it was when he killed it.

Since then in 2004, Internet reports have put monster hogs all over the place and some have been true, others not so much.

One thing though has been certain: Wild Hogs just don't get that big naturally. Pigs of that size, as Field and Stream tells us, are most likely a cross between wild and domestic.

What is this one that was taken in Delta? Who knows, but I'm off to find out. But not before I get a sausage biscuit.