The REAL Hogzilla!...

I'd really like to see the hog but unfortunately, I couldn't get any of the above links to work.

A bigger "Hogzilla"? I'm P.O.'ed!

I just read that an 11 year old boy killed a giganto wild hog, much bigger than the infamous "Hogzilla". What makes me angry is that, according to the news report, he shot it eight times with a .500 revolver, then chased it for three hours before dispatching it with a final, close-up shot. My, doesn't that look good to the anti's out there! I hope his daddy is right proud of him- and his own self.

Chuck

Who gives a rats tail end what some anti thinks? Not everybody can make a clean kill on a gnat at 500 yards. (I exaggerate to illustrate the absurdity of giving this kid a hard time for however many shots it takes.) If it takes five shots or 8 shots or 16 shots to finally kill the beast then that what it takes. I seriously doubt his hunting companions were saying "just wing it son so we can chase it for three hours".

Not my point. Ethical hunters, as most here certainly are, try for a clean, humane kill, often passing up a questionable shot. This monster would have been a challenge for a 30-06, but a .500 just made him angry.
Chuck

Torpid.....

That's funny!

Godzilla vs Hogzilla
Coming to a theatre near you

I realize that this pig might have been a pest or even a threat to someone or something important, but the rest of the story doesn't enhance my day. The story I read had the father and at least one other 'hunter' w/rifles following the kid as backup, so a humane dispatch of a pest doesn't appear to be the goal here, and if not, what was the point? To give the kid some kind of satisfaction or fame? I'd like to feel that a proficiency in mathematics, a more than passing familiarity with world history, or even a competence in a language(including, but not limited to, the kid's native tongue) would receive as much( or God forbid, even more) dedication and attention as did the hectoring and pursuit that was devoted to slaughtering this remarkable pig. Getting a hair off the tail of this thing without killing or drugging it(by wit and knowledge) and living to tell the story would be an entertainment more worthy of a man's sporting efforts than this dragged out exhibition of one's ability to pull the trigger on some giant handgun.

Won't somebody please think of the piglets!

Inspired me with your parody entry torpid.
So here's my entry ... took me a LOT longer than I planned, I'll tell you that. Notice I completely reconstructed the woods where the people were sitting, the kid especially.. quite frankly it wasn't worth it.. hehe .. hopefully you guys will get a kick out of it though.

Sorry I have to use the term but ...What a bunch of hogwash... Its a big pig, dont get me wrong, but the cheezy forced perspective in a few of the photographs does nothing but make them look like a bunch of hucksters shilling for the gamefarm. Look at one of the pics in which the revolver is laying on the pig, it nearly spans its head. Now look at the pic in which "lil arbucle is holding the firearm... Ooops! I guess that if'n ya do your huntin in a "gamefarm" yur going to need to do a little embelishment.

His dad needs to buy him a bike and stop ignoring a very real problem that is going to negatively effect his life in a very profound way.

BTW...That aint huntin.

The dad has set up a website, but it is down since the story was on FOX News this morning. http://www.monsterpig.com/

<still laughing at hexidismal's post>

I believe that the first shot with the four men in baseball caps posing in the background was pretty close to not faked, although they did take advantage of perspective to make the hog seem a little bigger. Nothing fake about that, just what they teach you in make-um-pretty school.

After seeing a hog repeatedly try to eat anything live or dead, including its feeder, good riddance to lots of bacon.

jm

If it takes five shots or 8 shots or 16 shots to finally kill the beast then that what it takes. I seriously doubt his hunting companions were saying "just wing it son so we can chase it for three hours".

Click to expand...

problem is that there were guides with rifles during the hunt:
(from: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,275524,00.html)

"His father said that, just to be extra safe, he and the guides had high-powered rifles aimed and ready to fire in case the beast with 5-inch tusks decided to charge."

the guides/dad could have put it down humanely. i'm sure the dad really wanted to be proud of his son to take such a large animal on his own. i don't want to burst his bubble or his son's, but i think most ethical hunters would agree this was poor judgment.

When I was a kid, my dad in reply to me looking for someone "they went to feed the hogs and fell in". I really did not understand this until I got older. My dad grew up on a farm.

Looks like my second Mother-In-Law without her dentures and make-up.

Biker
__________________

Click to expand...

Mouthful of iced tea on the keyboard...thanks

Made me laugh, even with a hangover!

Okay, now I'm just angry at all this,
Just to clarifty-now that I see everyone but the kid had rifles-it was in no way a humane hunt. The kid fired 16 shots, 7 missed, 8 hits were at a distance, and the nineth was at point blank range to finish it off. IMHO the kid could have handled a rifle better than the revolver, and he's dad should have finished the job when he saw that the kid wasn't able to do so quickly and humanely. My dad took me fishing, we had loads of fun, we didn't even need to land "troutzilla" and make a website and get on the news I enjoyed all but one fishing trip with him.

This isn't hunting, it's like when we took grandpa to the hatchery cause he was too bad off to get to the lake. IIRC he landed 6 trout, I got two, and dad watched. It wasn't fishing, I didn't even use bait. I saw it as assisted suicide for mistreated fish. Though the two trout I caught that day were bigger than any others before or sense I don't count them as the biggest trout. You might as well raise a pig to be that size, let it loose int he back yard and spend the afternoon killing it.

Okay, done ranting, off the soap box.

Does it seem suspicious to anyone else that an 11 year old was even able to handle a .500?

Ty

Biker get's the award for best post in this thread!

So sure it's a Photoshop job ? Well, yes and no.

Note: This is basically a duplicate of my post on TFL , with some minor alterations for THR.

I'd like to take a minute here to address all the comments of how these images are "so clearly" photoshop work. This line of discussion interests me, as knowing and understanding the makeup of digital images is something I do as part of my living, and so I'd like to share my thoughts with you. I'd like to use two specific graphic images as comparison. First I'd like to show you an image which is real. Rather than glut up the post, I'll provide a link. I do not know where this image originates from, only that it was posted here by kungfuhippie in post #30
Here is the first pic, you'll be referring back to this one.

http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m211/Bigamhuntr/IMG_2189.jpg

Now, thats a big pig ! Do you think that image is a photoshop work ? Think again.
Ok, what makes me think that ? Some of you no doubt are familiar with exif data, and some of you I'm sure are not. So let me explain that as quickly as possible. Exif data is info hidden inside a digital photograph. It can be easily accessed with many programs, but understanding it all is another thing entirely. All cameras (and photoshop) leave behind a digital trail in the data, and this can tell us a lot of things. One important thing to note is that exif data can be modified and faked. IF one has all the appropriate data relevant to a specific camera it can be done, but it would be tedious.
Now, I'm not going to give a ton of examples here as to the how and why, but I am MOSTLY satisfied that this particular image is direct unaltered JPG upload from a Canon A75. (And to other graphics people, no I'm not just looking at the camera name.. I'm quite qualified to interpret all exif data). But why do I say I'm only MOSTLY convinced ? Well, that's interesting. See, the exif data has a slight anomaly when compared to this next image, which was taken(according to the data), with the same model camera just under 3 minutes later. Same model, and a near number label would of course lead one to believe it's the same camera used.

http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m211/Bigamhuntr/IMG_2196.jpg

Which would of course make sense. The problem ? I don't have a access to a canon A75 (actually if anyone is interested to play detective, and does have one, PM me) The aforementioned anomaly MIGHT lead me to believe that it was a different camera of the same model, or perhaps a different memory module, but could just as easily be an automatic setting variable. Everything else is consistent with being perfectly real and unaltered. I only mentioned the anomaly as a possible, though highly unlikely, sign of exif tampering.
Wow.. this is getting really long .. still with me people ? Anyway , in the first pic, I'll just keep it short and say I can find no evidence of digital manipulation. So, what I'm saying here folks, is if that first picture was altered, it is VERY GOOD WORK. Which is NOT consistent with the monsterpig.com photo . Moving on ...

To the monsterpig.com photo. The image in question, that most of you are referring to:
http://www.monsterpig.com/betterespigpic.jpg
You're correct, not real. It is both a forced perspective shot, and a digital manipulation. I can't use exif data as an example, because the data would have been altered to to include the site ad logo. You don't need to crunch the numbers though, the manipulation is so lax it easily seen. I've prepared a very rough image with some examples.



Well, be using the first image as a comparison here. They were shot at slightly different angles, but close enough.
Where I say "break in continuity, in all fairness this could be caused by simple bad resizing technique, go to small then back to larger from there and you've lost a lot of data and you'll get some blocky non-continuous things.. so even though it's there , lets ignore it. Why ? Because we dont need it. Compare the first pic I posted again to this one, and you'll notice there are dark hanging branches in the real pic that start on the left side of the center tree, and none on the fake. It's too prominent to be total resize loss. Oops monsterpig, I caught you .. but lets go on. Although it is partially a forced perspective (the kid is farther back then you are led to believe), also he HAS been altered to be smaller in the pic. To the uninitiated, what I refer to as "healing marks and errors" are an example of a sloppy job of reconstructing the area that would otherwise be left blank when you try to resize only part of an image. One has to repeat pixels from another part of the image, and then blend them in effectively. Obviously whoever made the image thought that a bad job of resizing would damage enough data to cover up the bad work.. but it didn't.

Well, I cant believe I bothered to get into all this, and type all this out. But hopefully this was informative to you.
-hexidismal

Great write up hexidismal!!!

Hexidismal, your killing me LOL. I hope that the fine people here would not give the kid a hard time. He was doing what the 3 adults were telling him (dad and 2 guides). Which is sad.

As far as feral hogs go they are very destructive. Here at Fort Riley Kansas on the military reservation they had a program where they were shooting them from helis to rid the range roaches.

The obvious question as already asked is how can a kid shoot a S&W 500 w/350 grain load? Some of my friends won't even shoot my 50 DE. The 500 has far greater recoil.

How would people feel if I documented a bambi hunt with a 22 short revolver? Forget chasing em. I'd have the hunt on a fenced in parking lot and go after em on a quad. Never have I understood the media or for that matter most people.

Well the kid was on CNN yesterday...

Foxnews had an exclusive with the kid today, apparently.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,276386,00.html

Foxnews.com said:

Boy Who Killed Monster Hog Says 'It's Not Fake'
Wednesday, May 30, 2007

By Sara Bonisteel

An 11-year-old Alabama boy caught in the center of a humongous hog controversy denied his monster kill was staged Wednesday in an interview with FOXNews.com.

"I just want to say it’s not fake," said Jamison Stone of Pickensville, Ala.

Stone made news last week when the world learned of his massive kill, a 1,051-pound feral hog, which he shot eight times with a pistol on a Georgia hunting preserve. But the young man soon found himself in a media maelstrom when some Web sites questioned the veracity of the photographs.

"He did kill that pig," the boy's father, Mike Stone, told FOXNews.com. "Those pictures are not doctored."

Jamison, who recently completed the sixth grade at Christian Heritage Academy in Carrollton, Ala., shot the pig on a hunt May 3 at the Lost Creek Plantation in Delta, Ga., with a .50-caliber revolver. His story made national news and the family traveled to New York to talk about their adventure, but blogs soon claimed to be able to prove the photos were faked.

"No pictures have been touched," the 11-year-old said. "They first were saying I couldn’t shoot the gun, but I could and I did."

What should have been a moment of fun in the spotlight for a middle schooler became a nightmare, with some bloggers asking Mike Stone to take measurements of his son's skull to prove his claims, he said.

"Before we got to New York this was a feel good story, everybody was excited about it," Mike Stone said. "And now all of a sudden my family is suffering because people are making fun of it and thinking that it's not real."

After Jamison bagged his pig May 3, the Stones took their prize to the Clay County Farmers Exchange in Lineville, Ga., where it weighed in at 1,051 and measured approximately 9 feet 4 inches.

In the heat of the moment, Mike Stone said, they snapped a few photographs for family and friends to share Jamison's moment of pride.

"We would have took pictures of the scales, we would have took pictures of us measuring it, we would have took pictures of all the stuff if we would have thought this was going to be some big deal," Mike Stone said.

Jerry Cunningham, owner of Jerry's Taxidermy in Oxford, Ga., said the feral hog was one of the largest he'd seen.

"They’re about as twice as big as the normal pig," Cunningham told FOXNews.com. "Five-hundred pounds is big, giant. Most of them that come in to be mounted are between 150 and 250."

On Tuesday night, Cunningham showed Jamison the hog's mounted skull. Mike Stone, who stresses to his family the importance of hunting for food, had the rest of the humongous hog made into breakfast sausage.

“We gave a lot of it away ... some of them are going to use it at church fundraising breakfasts, some of them are going to use it for school fundraising breakfasts," Mike Stone said. "We actually do have two big freezers completely full."

The boy's pig adventure is documented on http://www.monsterpig.com, where the response from the public has been about 85 percent positive, Mike Stone said.

"Regardless of what the negative e-mails say, we're not ashamed of the fact that we actually hunt," Mike Stone said.

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