Photo of Monster Hog Called Into Question; Web Site Claims It Was Doctored
Is it a humongous hog, a monster mistake, or a huge hoax?
Source: Fox News
That’s the question being asked Tuesday about a stunning photo distributed last Friday by the Associated Press that purports to show an 11-year-old Alabama boy standing behind a half-ton wild hog his father said he bagged with a pistol.
The boy, Jamison Stone, looks tiny in the photo as he stands behind his prize pig, which his father claims measures 9 feet 4 inches, and weighs 1,051 pounds.
“It feels really good,” Jamison said last week in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “It’s a good accomplishment. I probably won’t ever kill anything else that big.”
Jamison’s father, Mike Stone, said the prize porker was hauled off on a truck to the Clay County Farmers Exchange in Lineville, where Jeff Kinder said they used his scale, recently calibrated, to weigh the hog, according to the Associated Press and a story published in the Anniston, Ala. Star newspaper.
Kinder’s scale measures only to the nearest 10, but Stone said it balanced one notch past the 1,050-pound mark.
“It probably weighed 1,060 pounds. We were just afraid to change it once the story was out,” he said.
But the photo — published on hundreds of Web sites, including FOXNews.com, and emailed millions of times — now is under attack from blogs and Web sites that claim to be able to prove that the boy and his father hammed it up for the photo, and that truth sometimes isn’t in the eye of the beholder.