by T-Bone
I open my Sports Illustrated, June 4 edition, and before I can get to the big news about Michael Vick and the ongoing pit bull fighting throwdown dragout, I see a little picture of a big hog on page 22. If you read Blogabillies a while back, you read about a giant porker called "Hogzilla" running loose in the suburbs of Atlanta. Apparently, such massive meat
hoofers are a dime a dozen in Dixie these days.
The one displayed in this week's Sports illustrated is a 1,051-pound pork roast, hunted down and shot by an 11-year-old with a .50-caliber revolver in Delta, Alabama.
"What the heck is an 11-year-old doing with a gun that would give John Wayne a cramp?" asked my 18-year-old daughter. I showed her the size of the hog and told her the kid had to pump the pig with eight rounds to knock his bacon into hoggy heaven.
She laughed and said, "There ya go. With hogs that big roaming the neighborhood, they better get the kid an AK47."
My wife looked over our shoulders and mumbled, "How does a hog get bigger than those before pics on a Subway commercial?"
Good question.
The story said the hog would likely yield 500 to 700 pounds of sausage ("We could have breakfast for the whole state of Alabama," the young man told the New York Post). With hogs this large lumbering under the loblollies, somebody better call Jimmy Dean and tell him not to buy any large appliances.
Where the heck were these hogs when I lived in Alabama? Obviously they spent 30 years at the hog buffet, carbo-loading for the showdown with 5th graders toting Dirty Harry-caliber heavy metal.
"Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, Mr. Ziffle?"
Finally, I get to the Vick dogfight article (Vick denies any involvement). This sad tale makes me pull Rudy, my Jack Russell, out from under the bed (where he is hiding after seeing the Bride of Hogzilla pic) and apologize for being a human being. I'm not saying Michael did anything right or wrong but what exactly were the bizarre blackened barns behind his mansion all about? The whole thing seems like a stinky sock left in the backseat.
According to the story, some NFL and NBA millionaires find absolutely nothing wrong with dogfighting, and some think it's perfectly fine to pay $40 grand for a pit bull and train the animal to try to kill other dogs in a bloody gnawfest.
Considering that there was a time when wealthy owners treated athletes like trained pit bulls, this attitude is not wholly unbelievable. Sports has snuggled up to the gladiator moniker more than a few times. But calling this treatment of animals "entertainment" is tragic.
Would it be entertainment if somebody starved one of those 1,000-pound hogs until he was in the mood to chew the rear end out of a hobby horse and then turn him loose in the locker room? Or the owner's box?
So you think you can dance?
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