Not too surprisingly, the headline-making picture was soon debunked as a PhotoShop-job. As one commentator put it so aptly: "the real jaw-dropper is that anbody in Alabama could figure out how to do it."
But then, hadn't the family been QUITE that greedy and not enlarged the boar THAT much out of proportion, they might have gotten away with it, but I doubt anybody would accuse them of undue subtlety.
To top it, it expired that it wasn't even a wild boar at all, it wasn't even a feral boar. It was a farm-raised pig (obviously with some boar genes) and it all happened at 200 acre low fence area (also reported as 150 acres). Two men, the father and a "guide", watched with rifles ready while the boy tried to kill the pig, which he finally managed three hours and umpteen shots later, which, incidentally, busts another bug in the story: If the animal had been as aggressive as wild boars tend to be, it would surely have attacked the boy after the first shot.
Of course, as it can be expected from an American audience, everybody who doesn't celebrate the fat little kid's performance is a leftist commie liberal, treehugger and worse. So what are reasons to kill an animal?
Food: Yeah! No doubt they had that in mind when they set off for the "wild boar hunt". Frankly, the Stone-family looks as needy of food as monster pig itself and -- boyoboy -- WILL they enjoy their pork sausages for the rest of the year and part of next, and should the cholesterol kill them off -- Three Cheers to Charles Darwin.
Besides, most people's chops aren't usually tormented to death over a longish period of time. The butcher-farmers I trust shoot their animals on the range, so they never know what hits them, or kill them in their own small abattoir or I buy game at shoots which I attended myself. (More expensive than industrially-produced meat? Certainly. But who said that the lower classes ought to hunt?)
Self-defense: Well, they didn't actually need to go into the area where the pig was fenced in or did they?
Preservation of the ecological balance: Right! That was what the Stone-family certainly had in mind when embarking of their hunting-spree.
Fun: Okay with me, but bragging rights for a 11-year-old boy don't count. And if the more educated classes among those who shoot/hunt don't see a point in chasing a terrified tame animal for hours while blowing holes into it, that doesn't make them liberal leftist commies or treehuggers.
All that said, I am not sure how many of the fakes, lies and exaggerations are coming from the family and how many from the media and this is not about a rather obvious and naive PhotoShop job. This is about American child-rearing values. What is the pathetic little boy who took (how many?) shots to kill a tame pig while his father and a second man with rifles were watching that he would be well and truly physically safe all the time, what is he but the male redneck-version of JonBenet Ramsey? The tool and object of perverted parental projections.
And this is, too and above all, about integrity. I would hate to listen to the howling and whining of the international media and public now had Prince Charles taken his sons to butcher a tame pig. What makes an enjoyable little yarn for the mainstream media as long as it's about some rednecks from the American backwaters, would be an outrage of major proportions had the class enemy done just the same.
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