When a man heard his dog barking, followed by his daughter’s screams, he ran to the window to see what was wrong. When he looked out across his front yard, he couldn’t believe what he saw. That’s when he grabbed his gun and killed an 820-pound beast just outside of his front door.
Wade Seago was at his rural home in Samson, Alabama, when he heard the family’s pet schnauzer, Cruiser, incessantly barking at something outside. Since his home sits on 100 acres, the property and the surrounding area are often teeming with wildlife, it’s not unusual for Cruiser to bark at deer, raccoons, or other visitors, so Wade initially didn’t think much of it — until he heard his daughter’s screams.
“I jumped up to see what was going on,” Wade recalled. “I looked out the back window and saw nothing, so I ran to the front of the house where my daughter was looking out the window. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he continued. “Cruiser had this huge hog confused with all of the barking and movement,” Wade continued. “It was not a good situation.”
Indeed, the dog had a huge hog bayed in his front yard, about 5 yards off of the front porch, but this was like no other boar that Wade, who is an avid hunter and runs a taxidermy business, had ever seen. While wild hogs are abundant in the area and Wade has seen them on his property before, this one was a “mammoth,” according to AL.com. It was so large that Wade feared that the huge hog would injure or even kill Cruiser, so he grabbed the .38 caliber revolver that he keeps for home defense and went out on his front porch.
“By the time I got in a position to shoot, the hog was about 12 yards away,” Wade said. “Cruiser was out of my line to the hog so I fired.”
It took three shots before the giant beast with six-inch tushes hit the ground near the carport, but it wasn’t until the next day that Wade fully grasped just how big this monstrous pig actually was. When he took the hog to Brooks Peanut Company and weighed it on the drive-thru scales, Wade learned it was a whopping 820 pounds.
Although he didn’t trust the meat and decided to discard it, Wade planned to at least stuff the hog and display its head and shoulders at his taxidermy shop, he said, adding that he had no regrets about killing the animal, which he believed could have posed a threat to the safety of his family.
“It’s so humid down here it had to hang all night. I wouldn’t trust the meat,” Wade explained. “I didn’t think twice about taking down this hog,” he said. “I’d do it again tomorrow.”
Of course, not everyone was happy to see a hog getting killed. After Wade posted images of the animal on social media, naysayers and anti-hunters were quick to lambaste him for shooting the pig. But, there was another issue as well. Many claimed the hog wasn’t feral at all but rather a domestic hog, saying it appeared “recently shaven” and “too genetically correct” to be wild — and it turns out that they may have been right.
According to UPI, local resident Trish Garcia came forward and said the hog had actually escaped from a pen in her yard. Garcia added that the hog wasn’t a pet, but rather it had been loaned to her to breed with some of her hogs. However, she didn’t blame Wade Seago for shooting the animal on his property. After all, it’s probably not a good idea to wait around to find out if a nearly 1,000-pound beast is a friend or foe when your family pet’s life is at stake — and that’s exactly what Wade thought.
“I didn’t care if it was wild or not, it came through my yard at night looking like a tank with 6-inch cutters,” Wade wrote in response to his critics. “It had to go.”
What’s more, killing feral hogs is encouraged in Alabama, and until it was dead and inspected, it would have been difficult for Wade to differentiate the barreling boar from a wild one in the dark of night. Feral hogs, although commonly found in Alabama, are considered an invasive species and pose a serious threat to native wildlife, according to the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Making matters worse, with high reproductive rates and a lack of natural predators, the hog population is ever-growing.
In an attempt to keep it under control, Alabama law permits hunters to kill as many as they would like on private property. In fact, it’s not only permitted, it’s encouraged because feral hogs, with their destructive rooting behavior and voracious omnivorous feeding habits, cause more than $800 million of agricultural damage in the United States annually, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated. Therefore, there are no closed seasons and no bag limits, allowing hunters to legally kill hogs every day of the year without harvest restrictions. Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that, if you have a mammoth hog, don’t let it get loose in Alabama.
