Despite the furor over Pigzilla and other monster pigs, the average Bama wild porker weighs less than 200 pounds. Photo by John E. Phillips.

In Alabama, a hunter can end up with the bragging rights for downing a hog with a weight of 600 pounds or better in three ways. The easiest way: Simply shoot any sizable boar hog and then have one of your buddies "guesstimate" its weight. As long as no one ever puts the porker on the scales, it's likely to grow even bigger as the tales of your triumph are passed around.

Another method: Trap a live hog, keep it in a pen to fatten, release it, and hunt it down and shoot it. As long as such a feral pig isn't relocated from the site of its capture, this is legal.

Or you can shoot a sizable wild hog and record the event by means of creative camera techniques: Just stand several feet (or yards) behind the hog while the person taking the picture moves up close to the animal; the hog fills the entire frame of the picture -- and so appears larger than the hunter standing behind it. (A more-technological version of this stunt would employ the wonders of modern digital programs like Photoshop.)

The worst thing that ever can happen to a gigantic trophy-sized hog is for it to be weighed on an accurate set of scales, because the hog's supposed weight drastically shrinks.

All of the above is meant to highlight the point that the rash of giant wild hogs harvested around the southeast in recent years should be taken with a grain of salt.

"Any feral hog that weighs more than 600 pounds and is harvested in an enclosure is suspect to have been fed on something other than wild forage," pointed out Keith Guyse, assistant chief of the Wildlife Section for Alabama's Division of Freshwater Fisheries and Wildlife.

The average feral hog in Alabama weighs from 50 to 175 pounds. So in 2007, when Pigzilla, the giant Alabama hog that reportedly weighed 1,051 pounds, jumped into the national spotlight, a lot of skeptical eyebrows were raised among Alabama hog hunters.

As it turned out, that skepticism was well founded. When you look deeper into the story, you learn that 11-year-old Jamison Stone shot the hog in a 150-acre low-fence enclosure at Lost Creek Plantation near Anniston. He reportedly shot this monster hog using a Smith & Wesson Model 500 revolver with a holographic scope with a ported barrel firing a 350-grain Hornaday cartridge.

The first warning sign, however, was that this area of the Cotton State has been never known for producing large numbers of any size hogs.

After a flurry of publicity, scrutiny came next. Later it was revealed that the hunter and his father had been hoodwinked, along with the local and national media. The would-be-hunters were charged $15,000 to shoot a trophy wild hog that turned out to be "Fred," a domestically raised hog purchased for $250. In fact, Fred had only recently been moved to the Lost Creek Plantation.

Jamison's father, Mike Stone, arranged the hunt for his son with Keith O'Neal and Charles Williams, owners of Southeastern Trophy Hunters. They in turn brokered the hunt with Eddy Borden, the owner of Lost Creek Plantation. Mike Stone was assured his son would harvest a wild hog. The boy got his pig, but Fred was more like a pet at the farm of Rhonda and Phil Blissitt, on which it had been raised.