posted on Jul, 29 2004 @ 10:34 AM
Studying the photograph more closely, and accounting for the fact that the man in the picture is standing in a trench, I don't think that hog is
really 12 feet long.
If it is, then the guy in the picture is probably about 7 or 8 feet tall. If you measure him, then measure the hog, he's about 2/3 as tall as the hog
is long.
If we assume that the man is, in fact, not a giant, and call him, say, 6 feet tall, that makes the hog about 9 feet long.
As for the 1000 lbs, I'm not sure how they arrived at that without a scale, so it's probably a generous estimate.
So I suspect Hogzilla may not be quite as big as advertised, but still pretty darn big.
As for hunting them, it's worth bearing in mind that allowing human-introduced livestock to multiply without predators is a guaranteed way to wreck
an ecosystem and wipe out large portions of other animal species in the process, before having the huge population of feral livestock themselves die
off en masse due to disease and starvation in the end anyway.
If you haven't seen what a bunch of hungry hogs can do to a forest, think "lunar landscape" with trees, although as they got hungrier, they would
probably start chewing the bark off the trees as well and end up killing them. They can and do dig up anything remotely edible, including roots,
bulbs, etc., and will become less picky (they aren't very picky to begin with) about what they eat as they get hungrier.
Hogs will eat just about anything, including each other and humans as opportunity permits. Check geneological charts, especially in Europe, and you
will find more than a few ancestors killed by wolves and wild boars. While many died hunting them, quite a few were killed merely for being in the
wrong place at the wrong time, especially women and children.
These are not the kind of creatures you want to see running around the forest unchecked by predators.