After teasing us with the time-testing queary “who is the thug” for several weeks, The New York Times switches gears and asks “what is the hog?” Thanks to Sam Frank for the link to the following item by Shaila Dewain.

Drinking a mixture of Fanta Cherry and Pibb Extreme on his lunch break, Mr. Griffin, (above right) 32, told the story he has told a thousand times: He was picking up after hunters when he saw the hog. He grabbed a rifle from his truck and fired. “I shot him, and he turned around and walked off, and I thought, how’d I miss something that big?” Mr. Griffin said. He said he followed the hog into the swamps, where it collapsed and died. Mr. Griffin said he managed to drag it out with a backhoe.

Mr. Holyoak said he measured Hogzilla “with a ruler” and drove the hog in his flatbed truck to a peanut scale. The meat was too gamey to eat, he said, and the pig was too expensive to stuff, so he told Mr. Griffin to bury it.

But before they laid Hogzilla to rest, Mr. Holyoak shot a picture of the pig trussed up by the hind legs, dangling from the backhoe. Later, he had six people sign affidavits saying they had seen the 1,000-pound wild hog (each signer circled “alive” or “dead”).