Hogzilla legend has N.C. challenger

Remember the hubbub over Hogzilla, the mammoth Georgia porker killed in 2004?

That hybrid hog (part wild boar, part Hampshire) first was said to weigh 1,000 pounds and measure 12 feet long. The folks at National Geographic later dug up the carcass and estimated the weight at 800 pounds and length at about 8 feet.

Those are just about the dimensions of a feral pig Donald Strickland of Whitakers killed in Nash County on Nov. 19.

Let's call it Pigfoot.

Strickland, 31, a heavy equipment operator with the N.C. Division of Forest Resources and an avid deer hunter, had just finished a morning hunt when the pig business started.

"I was in the stand until 9 a.m. and didn't see anything," he said, "so I rode to another section of the farm to talk to some guys who were logging."

While he was talking to the loggers, one of them mentioned that a big pig had been seen in a field nearby.

Strickland drove to the field, and the big boar was still rooting around. At a range of 200 yards, Strickland shot the pig quartering away with a 168-grain slug from his Remington Model 700 chambered in .300 Remington Short Action Ultra Magnum.

"He squalled and took off like nothing happened," Strickland said. "But I knew I hit him because I could hear the bullet hit."

Strickland tracked the pig into the woods and delivered a coup de grace. A freezer full of fresh pork was in the offing.

Strickland had heard that one way to lessen the gaminess of a boar hog carcass was to castrate it, so off came the oysters. He started to skin the beast but quit in short order.

"He stunk like a rodeo goat," Strickland said.

A backhoe was used to load the hog into Strickland's pickup truck, and a trip over to the Tri-County Peanut Warehouse scale in Enfield confirmed a weight of 780 pounds. It measured 6 feet, 9 inches long from nose to tail.

The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission doesn't keep records on feral pigs, but it just might be the heaviest wild pig ever killed in North Carolina. Neither Mark Jones, former bear and boar biologist with the commission, nor Evin Stanford, deer biologist, was aware of a bigger pig.

"It's the largest we've ever heard of," Stanford said. "It's very rare for a free-ranging hog to get that big.

"It's possible that it might have been in captivity once."

Outside of a six-county area in the mountains, feral pigs have no closed season or bag limit.

"They're not a game species," Stanford said. "From our perspective, we kind of wished they weren't around. They are an undesirable species."

Strickland buried the carcass but kept the head to make a skull, or European, mount.

He doesn't plan to give up deer hunting for chasing pigs, but he did find the experience interesting.

"I've killed 200-pound bucks before," he said, "but killing something you can't budge is different."

With feral pig populations on the rise, he might need to keep a backhoe handy. Another Pigfoot may be out there.