From the NBC report and the website that the father of the kid that shot it... there seems to be a small conflict as to the size of the area that the pig was in. It was reported as 150 acres and 200 acres, a small part of the 2500 acre hunting preserve. Personally, I find fenced hunts to be pretty lame. Same thing with hunting over bait. Hunting preserves have staff that are paid to raise the animals to the biggest highest quality trophies they can. They know every inch of the preserve and every habit of every animal. It amounts to nothing more than someone paying thier fee, being driven out to a site, put in a blind and told that in 5.27 minutes, there's a pretty good chance that a huge trophy animal will probably walk in front of them. That ain't hunting, in my opinion. Hunting is taking your own time to learn the area, the habits of the animals in it, how to use your preferred hunting tool, etc...
And one more thing... killing a huge hog with a handgun ethically would take someone with skill. A kid using a large caliber handgun to attempt to kill a hog, then taking 9 shots and three hours to kill it just stinks. The animal sufferred, the kid should come away feeling some remorse for it, ethical hunting suffered for it. Someone should have put that hog down with a rifle as soon as it was apparent that the first or second shot wasn't going to do the job. Making that animal suffer for three hours when they had the tools to dispatch it quickly just smacks of good old boys running wild in the woods enjoying watching an animal suffer. Again, that's my opinion. I'm not anti-hunting. I let people hunt on my land. I fish as often as I get the chance. But making an animal suffer like they did is completely unexcusable and no one can defend what they did as ethical.
