south Georgia in 2004.
Hogzilla originally was thought to weigh
1,000 pounds and measure 12 feet in length. National Geographic
experts who unearthed its remains believe the animal actually
weighed about 800 pounds and was 8 feet long.
Regardless of the comparison, Jamison is
reveling in the attention over his pig, which has a Web site put
up by his father—www.MonsterPig.com —that is generating
Internet buzz.
"It feels really good," Jamison, of
Pickensville, said in a telephone interview with The Associated
Press. "It's a good accomplishment. I probably won't ever kill
anything else that big."
Jamison, who killed his first deer at age
5, was hunting with father Mike Stone and two guides in east
Alabama on May 3 when he bagged Hogzilla II. He said he shot the
huge animal eight times with a .50- caliber revolver and chased
it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off
with a point-blank shot.
Through it all there was the fear that the
animal would turn and charge them, as wild boars have a
reputation of doing.
"I was a little bit scared, a little bit
excited," said Jamison, who just finished the sixth grade on the
honor roll at Christian Heritage Academy,
a small, private school.
His father said that, just to be extra
safe, he and the guides had high-powered rifles aimed and ready
to fire in case the beast with 5- inch tusks decided to charge.
With the pig finally dead in a creek bed
on the 2,500-acre Lost Creek Plantation, a commercial hunting
preserve in Delta, trees had to be cut down and a backhoe
brought in to bring Jamison's prize out of the woods.
It was hauled on a truck to the Clay
County Farmers Exchange in Lineville, where Jeff Kinder said
they used his scale, which was recently calibrated, to weigh the
hog.
Kinder, who didn't witness the weigh-in,
said he was baffled to hear the reported weight of 1,051 pounds
because his scale—an old, manual style with sliding weights—only
measures to the nearest 10.
"I didn't quite understand that," he said.
Mike Stone said the scale balanced one
notch past the 1,050-pound mark, and he thought it meant a
weight of 1,051 pounds.
"It probably weighed 1,060 pounds. We were
just afraid to change it once the story was out," he said.
The hog's head is now being mounted on an
extra-large foam form by Jerry Cunningham of Jerry's Taxidermy
in Oxford. Cunningham said the animal measured 54 inches around
the head, 74 inches around the shoulders and 11 inches from the
eyes to the end of its snout.
"It's huge," he said. "It's just the
biggest thing I've ever seen."
Mike Stone is having sausage made from the
rest of the animal. "We'll probably get 500 to 700 pounds," he
said.
Jamison, meanwhile, has been offered a
small part in "The Legend of Hogzilla," a small-time horror
flick based on the tale of the Georgia boar. The movie is
holding casting calls with plans to begin filming in Georgia.
Jamison is enjoying the newfound celebrity
generated by the hog hunt, but he said he prefers hunting
pheasants to monster pigs.