Is 87-stone hog hunter telling porkies? - Update

Is this one of biggest wild hogs to have roamed the earth? Or a hoax by Alabama rednecks, cleverly using perspective, knowledge of hunting and the power of the internet to have a joke at the expense of urban dwellers everywhere?

According to the Associated Press, the photograph shows Jamison Stone, 11, after he used a .50 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver to shoot a pig that his father said weighed a colossal 1,051 lbs - more than 87 stone - and measured 9 feet four inches.

Perhaps conveniently, the remains of Jamison's quarry, which he is said to have pursued for more than three hours on a commercial hunting preserve in Alabama called Lost Creek Plantation, are unavailable. The head is already being mounted and the flesh being used to produce an estimated 700lbs of sausages.



Look closely at the photograph, carried by many newspapers in Britain yesterday and viewed well over a million times on the internet, and you can see that Jamison is kneeling behind the hog. With the animal in the foreground, it could appear to be much bigger than it probably was.

But Jamison's father Mike has wasted no time making his son, briefly at least, the most famous hunter in America. Mr Stone has established a website called www.monsterpig.com, sponsored by cookersandgrills.com, stating that Jamison had secured a small part in a film about Hogzilla. The site also offers T-shirts, baseball caps and posters for sale.

Other photographs on the site show Jamison and other hunters with the hog. In each one, the hog is in the foreground and the people some distance behind it.