They Called Him MISTER Pig...

An 11 year-old boy shot and killed a giant wild boar with a .50 caliber revolver. It looks like a REALLY large animal, more like a small woolly rhinoceros than a pig. For a hunter, it's quite an achievement.

For everyone else, however, it seems to be either a travesty of barbarism and violence, or an outright hoax. I was tracking down the story, which I found on USAToday, and also found some a message board on Snopes that talks about it. And I was convinced that I could be snarky and judgmental. I guess because I grew up around people who hunted, I don't have a revulsion reflex that makes me upset or angry about this episode, or unwilling to give the story any credibility. (Although I would concede that the photograph seems to take advantage of forced perspective. I would have posed the boy in front of the animal, so you could get a better sense of their relative sizes. But we'll see if it turns out to be faked.)

If it is a hoax, I'm betting that it's really a Volkswagen wrapped in fur...