By Shaila Dewan
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
March 19, 2005
ALAPAHA, Ga. – Few episodes in this modern age have displayed the Southern talent for tall tales like the legend of Hogzilla, the allegedly 12-foot, 1,000-pound wild hog shot and killed on a south Georgia farm last June.
Documented by only a single photograph before the carcass was buried, Hogzilla drew television crews from as far as Japan and appeared on the cover of Weekly World News. The pig became the theme of Alapaha's annual festival. People from California and New Jersey called to order hog T-shirts.
So tall did the tale become that in November, a team of scientists exhumed Hogzilla and went at him with calipers and DNA tests. Now all of Berrien County awaits their findings, which are to be broadcast on the National Geographic Channel tomorrow at 5 and 8 p.m.
Some people say the hog had to have been raised in a pen to get that big. Others think there was no hog at all. No one figured the argument would ever be resolved. And, anyway, that was not the point. Asked whether she believed Hogzilla was real, Beverly Moore, a retired bookkeeper eating lunch at Flander's Cafe in Alapaha, raised her eyebrows and said, "It's a real story."
Few hunting yarns could stand up to a posse of Ph.D.s in yellow hazard suits. In fact, new technology has generally made it easier – not harder – to practice the art of embellishment, said Wiley Prewitt, a collector of hunting and fishing lore in Kilmichael, Miss. There is a cottage industry in making realistic sets of antlers out of resin to mount as trophies, he said, and photographs no longer back up a story.
"Some guy kills a deer and takes a picture of it," Prewitt said. "He'll take it to his buddy who's got all the computer software and they'll turn it into a world record."
But two people were eager for the credibility they hoped a scientific investigation would bring: Ken Holyoak, who owns Ken's Hatchery and Fish Farms Inc., and his former employee Chris Griffin, who killed Hogzilla with a single shot last June. The men have had a falling-out over the hog, and Griffin now fixes flats at the Wal-Mart in nearby Fitzgerald.
Holyoak, who also operates hog hunts on his land, allowed National Geographic to dig up Hogzilla because, he said, he wanted the free advertising, and he thought the hog might be a world record.
Griffin says he is tired of doubters. "They're going to eat a whole lot of humble pie come Sunday evening," he said.
Drinking a mixture of Fanta Cherry and Pibb Extreme sodas on his lunch break, Griffin, 32, told the story he has told a thousand times: He was picking up after hunters when he saw the hog. He grabbed a rifle from his truck and fired. "I shot him, and he turned around and walked off, and I thought, how'd I miss something that big?" Griffin said. He followed the hog into the swamps, where it collapsed and died. Griffin managed to drag it out with a backhoe.
Holyoak said he measured Hogzilla "with a ruler" and drove the hog in his flatbed truck to a peanut scale. The meat was too gamy to eat, he said, and stuffing the pig would have been too expensive, so he told Griffin to bury it.
But before they laid Hogzilla to rest, Holyoak took a picture of the pig trussed up by the hind legs, dangling from the backhoe. Later, he had six people sign affidavits saying they had seen the 1,000-pound wild hog. Each signer circled "alive" or "dead."
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