These people make me want to puke. I have said it time and time again. This type of behavior does so much to un-do everything that ethical hunters “do” to try and present positive images to the public.

Rhonda Roland Shearer does a great job in unravelling (exposing) this mess. Read the full story at her site. Long story short, the boy was misled by a bunch of adults who defy rational description.

Part of her findings:

Using buzzwords associated with the Hogzilla hype, O’Neal placed an advertisement on April 28th. It promised a “once in a lifetime” hunt for a “monster” wild boar that they had “trapped” and that was now “roaming the wilds of the Lost Creek Plantation.”

It turns out that the “monster” boar was in fact plain ol’ Fred, a domesticated, part Duroc hog whose original owner, Phil Blissitt, said that the guides Borden and Williams drove their truck to pick up the swine from his farm on April 29th. (Allen Andress, the chief of law enforcement for the Alabama Wildlife and Fisheries Division, confirmed the pickup date in a separate phone interview.) Borden paid Blissitt $250 for the hog, and in that instant Fred went from breeding stock to “wild” beast just four days before the hunt.

O’Neal, in charge of selling the hunting escapade, knew full well there was no, “beast roaming Lost Creek.” Still, he placed an advertisement on his web site, Southeasterntrophyhunters.com, and sent out a mailing to hype the canned hunt as a safari-like adventure. He may have already had Mike Stone in mind as a prospect. The ad featured Stone himself, who had shot a 627-pound hog at Lost Creek only weeks before. He also mentioned that Borden had just trapped another boar larger than the one Stone had shot.

According to Mike Stone, a local news station advised O’Neal that in order for the hunt to become a news story, only the boy – not an adult – could take the shot. The media got what they asked for, and a brave young lad shot and killed a “monster” hog in the wilds of Alabama.

Trouble was, it just wasn’t true.

The Anniston Star newspaper reported on May 30th that hunt organizers O’Neal and Williams said they “knew the harvest of the pig alone would draw some attention but that the addition of Jamison doing the shooting moved the story to a higher level.”

O’Neal told the paper: “We knew it was going to be something significant because of the sheer size. The fact that an 11-year-old did it with a pistol, that’s what perpetuated it and has kept it going.”

The Star continued: “O’Neal and Williams went on to say that a lot of this skepticism might have never happened. They had invited television stations to come with them on the hunt, but none showed up.”

It was the Star’s May 23, 2007 report that first launched the story into the media; StinkyJournalism.org discovered that it also was invited to attend the hunt, but did not disclose this fact. (We will be writing more later about the media’s responsibilities and role in this international fake news story.) We also found out the main independent witness used to verify the hog’s size and skull for the Star, taxidermist Jerry Cunningham, had a business relationship with O’Neal for over 16 years. This should have been revealed to the public.

I orginally commented on this story here and here. I guess I am guilty, to a degree, of helping promote this. Shame on me.

“Kid kills big hog with pistol” - neat story. “Kid kills big pig with pistol, but not a clean shot” - An ok story. “Kid pumps a dozen rounds into a pet pig, to make a bunch of rednecks a pisspot full of money” - a travesty.