About a month ago I posted on the giant feral hog that an 11-year old kid shot in Alabama. So the story went, this kid was out hunting, came across this monster, and shot it. It was supposedly the largest wild hog on record. The kid’s dad put up a website the same day and the kid was on his way to his 15 minutes of fame on all the national TV talk shows when it came out that the whole thing wasn’t quite as described.
Apparently the giant hog was raised as a pet and hand fed by an elderly couple. When the animal got too large for them to deal with, they sold it to a game farm. The father paid for the kid to ‘hunt’ the hog in a fenced field, where he shot it a number of times before killing it. Dear old dad had the website all ready to go, but didn’t quit there.
As you can see from this website, there was a fair amount of Photoshop diddling with the pictures to make the hog look even larger than it was.
Chalk another one up to the online press (numerous articles) for outing this scam. You’ve got to watch these good ol’ boys from the South. I, of all people, should have known.
The official website of Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades, low carb pioneers and authors of Protein Power.
Hah!
Photoshopped.
I TOLD YOU SO!
Hmmm…I don’t see why people have a problem with saying that, it feels quite nice.
Kaz–
You did indeed tell me so, but as I recall it was the size of the hog that you had a problem with. There is no question that the hog was Photoshopped to make it look a little larger, but that’s not what I think is the hoax.
I thought that this kid ran across this animal and shot it in a mano a mano type confrontation, not that he had a fairly tame animal in a pen that he gunned down. In my opinion, that is a much more loathsome hoax than a little Photoshoppery.
Cheers–
MRE
Even more loathsome is the fact that it took him several shots to bring down what was a fairly tame animal. This is not hunting. It’s crap like this that gives hunters a bad name.
That poor animal. At the very least he deserved a single well-placed shot (or maybe two) with a proper gun for a quick, relatively painless death. Needless to say, there are several things I’d like to do to dear old dad and the folks that run those game farms.
Agreed!
I’d say what the hog needed was to be allowed to die of old age. I mean, more than normal pigs, ’cause of his accomplishment of being really effin’ huge.
I find rather disturbing the whole “wow, I have managed to kill something really exceptional and rare” concept.
I feel the same way. But there is some rationale for hunting trophy game that is large. In the wild an animal has to be crafty, tough and fast to live to get large enough to be trophy size. It takes more effort and skill to bring down such a wily animal as compared to a smaller one just learning the ropes. If they were easy to get, they wouldn’t be trophies.
Having said that, though, since adulthood I’ve never hunted for nor killed anything I didn’t eat, and that includes rattlesnakes (which taste like frog legs, if you’re wondering). I would never hunt simply for the sport of killing something. I don’t have a problem, though, if I’m going to eat my catch.
Cheers–
MRE