Burk Finley - Associate Producer If you’re a fan of urban legends then last summer you would likely have heard the audacious tale of a monstrous 12-foot, 1000-pound swine, appropriately named “Hogzilla,” that had been shot in a swamp in Georgia. A grainy photograph of the beast strung from a backhoe next to the victorious hunter, spread like wildfire on the Internet triggering worldwide awe and disbelief. It was prime fodder for a bad sci-fi flick. Or, could this beast possibly be real? On October 23, 2004, a team from National Geographic Explorer decided to find out. It took a while to get around the campy notion of investigating a feral hog. But as the first few weeks of preparation for the shoot passed by, I found myself captivated by the mystery of this giant swine, and what it reveals about the larger issue of feral pigs worldwide.

A wild boar piglet in England, where wild boar have recently returned after being extinct for 500 years.

Today more than a billion domestic pigs live among us. There are millions more in the wild and the numbers are escalating rapidly. The animals are increasingly at odds with farmers as they root up crops and pastures in their quest for food. Pigs are exceptionally adaptable animals, and in many places their natural predators have declined or been eradicated altogether, opening the floodgates for a massive population boom. In Texas alone there are two million wild hogs—that’s one hog for every ten Texans. Our team took a detour to Texas, where the fine gentlemen of Kaufman County showed us what it’s like to hunt a feral pig first hand. I will never forget the intensity of chasing the hunters through the briars of East Texas with a load of sound equipment around my shoulders, trying to get the best shots while avoiding the charge of an angry 250 pound pig--with tusks big enough to put more than a hole in your jeans. Hunting hogs is big business. Hunters from around the world come to the southern US to shoot trophy hogs—and the bigger the better. In many cases the owners of these hunting ranges feed the hogs to lure big money clients. Could Hogzilla have just been an over fed hog that had dodged the bullet? We then flew to England where wild boar--locally extinct for hundreds of years—had been recently reintroduced as livestock ultimately destined for European markets. But for the past few years escaped boars have begun repopulating the countryside. Tracking these boars at night and filming these magnificent beasts up close as they move easily through the open grass fields is something one doesn’t get to do every day. And then there was Hogzilla—allegedly a feral pig who roamed the forests and pastures of a 1500-acre fish hatchery, gorging himself on anything he came across. Because of the mystery and controversy surrounding the story, we made it our mission to go to southern Georgia and literally dig this beast up to discover the truth. I had no idea what an olfactory assault this would be.

Wearing PVC suits, a team of scientists and laborers start to dig up Hogzilla's grave.

When we finally arrived in Georgia, the sun was warm, the days were clear, and Hogzilla lay peacefully in his grave. The first tangible connection to Hogzilla himself came at the tip of hunter Chris Griffin’s shovel as it sliced into the sandy clay to reveal a small, extremely odiferous tuft of hair. The dig crew, including a pig DNA specialist and a feral pig expert, knew immediately what they had gotten into from the first whiff. We worked tirelessly in the unrelenting sunshine, sweating in our yellow PVC suits, surgical gloves, and rubber boots as we uncovered the body of the animal. At one point, Erin Harvey, the cameraman, was literally lying on top of the beast to get a masterful shot of the two scientists revealing their discovery. We watched as the scientists exhumed the corpse and reconstructed the body, taking measurements and samples for DNA testing—was Hogzilla a hybrid of wild boar and domesticated pig or a genetic mutant? At the end of the day we all walked away from the site as though we were leaving a freshly discovered Egyptian tomb. We had discovered the truth about Hogzilla. In fact, some of the camera equipment still retains the beast’s special fragrance to this day.