A Nation Wallows

There once was a pig named Fred who came to a very bad end in Alabama, as I suppose all pigs in Alabama do. Fred was 6 weeks old when he was purchased by farmer Phil Blissitt in 2004 and given as a Christmas gift to his wife, Rhonda. This brings us to the first of this story’s many truisms: Christmas sucks in Alabama.

For 2 1/2 years, Fred was a happy pig. He would play with the Blissitts’ grandchildren and the family Chihuahua. Fred liked sweet potatoes, according to an AP story, and that may have been his undoing. For Fred grew large, more than 1,000 pounds and perhaps 9 feet long, with huge tusks jutting like Ka-Bar knives from his endlessly rooting maw. Dear, sweet, saber-toothed Fred started to worry the Blissitts, so one spring day, Phil sold him to the Lost Creek Plantation, a private, fenced-in reserve where he would be free to gambol and play, until he was shot.

Which, only days later, he was, and with extreme prejudice too. On May 3, 11-year-old Jamison Stone, hunting with his father and three rifle-toting “guides,” killed Fred with a .50-caliber handgun, shooting the erstwhile pet half a dozen times and chasing it for three hours around a 150-acre enclosure surrounded by a low fence. The trophy picture--of young Jamison posed with his apparently VW-sized quarry--exploded across the Internet, while the story made headlines around the world. “Jurassic Pork,” the New York Post slyly offered.

I smelled a large dead pig the moment I saw the picture. First, the now-famous picture of Fred and Jamison --one chubby and overfed, and the other a pig--used a common trophy-picture trick of having the animal much closer to the camera than the hunter, thus making the animal appear larger. I used to edit a hook-and-bullet magazine and, believe me, hunters and fishermen use the forced perspective gambit more than Roger Corman.

Second, no foraging wild boar gets to be 1,000 pounds. Only a domestic pig--and one fed generously with agricultural feed, table scraps and fast-food leftovers--can pack on that kind of weight. Domestic pigs do frequently get loose and, in the wild, revert to a lean and feral state. The most frightening thing about Fred is that he might be the half-ton, hormone-laced canary in America’s dietary coal mine.

The Stones claimed they thought they were hunting a feral hog, but come on. Fred might as well have been wearing a rhinestone collar.

You know we live in a great country when the Fred saga is only the latest “swine-of-unusual-size” story. In 2004, in southern Georgia, hunters claimed to have bagged the quasi-mythical “Hogzilla,” a 12-foot, 1,000-pound super-swine. These claims were difficult to verify--the hunters had hurriedly buried the beast--but the National Geographic Channel thought enough of the tale to gin up a documentary. Hogzilla’s loamy rest will be disturbed once more. A couple of enterprising Georgia hayseeds currently are trying to make a horror movie, “The Legend of Hogzilla.” Mr. Corman, you’re wanted on the set.

So, that’s a National Geographic documentary, a horror film and a major media sensation in the space of three years. It’s hard not to trip over the symbolism of grossly overfed hogs being the subject of intense American fascination, or is it empathy?

The Fred story is crystalline pop perfection--instantly ubiquitous, utterly ephemeral, absurdist and profound. Take the matter of hunting. Hunting is one of those bright lines that divides blue and red: Blue-staters can’t fathom the attraction of killing an animal for sport; red-staters despise the tree-hugging animal rights “extremists” who would defame this traditional pastime. For presidential candidates, hunting is a conservative litmus test. Witness Mitt Romney’s pathetic recent attempt to portray himself as a lifelong hunter. “I’ve always been a rodent and rabbit hunter, small varmints, if you will,” Romney said at a news conference in April. When you say “varmints,” governor, do you, in fact, mean “critters”?

My year will only be complete when we see Hillary Clinton in a blaze-orange vest.

But, as the Fred episode fairly illustrates, hunting today is a sick satire of the sport as it was in the days when Teddy Roosevelt took to the field. The number of hunters is declining rapidly, for all the reasons you’d expect. Increasingly, hunting is confined to private game “reserves” that cater to well-to-do sportsmen, a reversion to the royal game lands of England. In these confined areas, the principle of fair chase is a joke.

In December 2003, two years before he blasted his friend in the face at a Texas reserve, Dick Cheney went wing shooting at a Pennsylvania hunting club, where gamekeepers released 500 pen-raised pheasants in front of his party. Cheney is credited with shooting 70 of these birds like so many colorfully plumaged skeet.

And so at the intersection of our reckless meat-based food system, our swinish media obsessions, our weird nostalgia for tradition-affirming blood lust, there lies an enormous dead pig. What a country.