The Legend of Hogzilla

The majority of the forwarded stories pictures, and chain emails we get can quickly dispelled as urban legends by checking out some of the urban legend websites.  Some stories, however, aren't easily verified.  A few unbelievable stories prove to be in deed true.  Such is the case with the legend of Hogzilla. 

Back in July, Chris Griffin of Alapha, Georgia claimed that he killed a 12 foot long wild hog on a friend's plantation.  He said the hog weighed 1000 pounds and had tusks almost a foot long.  Suspiscions arose when a photo of Chris standing beside the dead hog was the only proof that Hogzilla existed.  Griffin and the owner of the plantation buried the giant hog on the property and didn't want to mess with slaughtering it, since the meat of large feral hogs is typically not good.  They also said that the hog's head was too big to mount on a wall; they said the head was the same diameter as a tire on a compact car.  The men said they had to life him with a backhoe.  For those unfamiliar with this breed of swine, feral hogs, or more commonly known as wild hogs, are simply domestic hogs that escaped from farms and began living off the land.  These wild hogs are hunted and killed because of their aggression, and how they can destroy entire fields of corn and peanuts. 

Since there were no other witnesses, the legend of Hogzilla turned into an urban legend.  It would have been easy to alter a photograph in Photoshop and make it look like a 6 foot tall man was dwarfed by a giant hog.  But a team of experts from National Geographic have confirmed that Hogzilla was real.  And was real big.  The team donned biohazard suits and exhumed the hog's remains.  They reported that Hogzilla wasn't quite as big as it's captors claimed - it was 'only' 8 feet long and weighed about 800 pounds. They also reported that it's tusks were 18 inches long.  Ken Holyoak, owner of the plantation where Hogzilla was killed, argues that it did in deed weight 1000 pounds when they weighed it on his farm scales.  They will get no argument from me -- that's one big hog.