A Nation Wallows
There once was a pig named Fred who came to a very bad end in Alabama, as I suppose all pigs in Alabama do. Fred was 6 weeks old when he was purchased by farmer Phil Blissitt in 2004 and given as a Christmas gift to his wife, Rhonda. This brings us to the first of this story's many truisms: Christmas sucks in Alabama.
For 2 1/2 years, Fred was a happy pig. He would play with the Blissitts' grandchildren and the family Chihuahua. Fred liked sweet potatoes, according to an AP story, and that may have been his undoing. For Fred grew large, more than 1,000 pounds and perhaps 9 feet long, with huge tusks jutting like Ka-Bar knives from his endlessly rooting maw. Dear, sweet, saber-toothed Fred started to worry the Blissitts, so one spring day, Phil sold him to the Lost Creek Plantation, a private, fenced-in reserve where he would be free to gambol and play, until he was shot.
Which, only days later, he was, and with extreme prejudice too. On May 3, 11-year-old Jamison Stone, hunting with his father and three rifle-toting "guides," killed Fred with a .50-caliber handgun, shooting the erstwhile pet half a dozen times and chasing it for three hours around a 150-acre enclosure surrounded by a low fence. The trophy picture--of young Jamison posed with his apparently VW-sized quarry--exploded across the Internet, while the story made headlines around the world. "Jurassic Pork," the New York Post slyly offered.
I smelled a large dead pig the moment I saw the picture. First, the now-famous picture of Fred and Jamison --one chubby and overfed, and the other a pig--used a common trophy-picture trick of having the animal much closer to the camera than the hunter, thus making the animal appear larger. I used to edit a hook-and-bullet magazine and, believe me, hunters and fishermen use the forced perspective gambit more than Roger Corman.
Second, no foraging wild boar gets to be 1,000 pounds. Only a domestic pig--and one fed generously with agricultural feed, table scraps and fast-food leftovers--can pack on that kind of weight. Domestic pigs do frequently get loose and, in the wild, revert to a lean and feral state. The most frightening thing about Fred is that he might be the half-ton, hormone-laced canary in America's dietary coal mine.
The Stones claimed they thought they were hunting a feral hog, but come on. Fred might as well have been wearing a rhinestone collar.
