Where else on the internet but LBLUS.com will you read about how the Piney Pizza Dude Kills Wild Hog on Fort Henry Road
You are the Land Between the Lakes pizza delivery driver, aka ‘The Pizza Dude’ and you have the task of driving piping hot pizzas to Piney Campground on beautiful Kentucky Lake in the Tennessee portion of the national recreation area on a busy holiday weekend evening.
As you are heading off of the steep hill on Fort Henry Road, but before you reach the former location of Wofford’s Grocery and the intersections leading to Lost Creek to the right and Mint Springs/Kentucky lake to the left, a crazy, huge wild hog , with tusks glinting in the headlights, runs right out in front of you and you smack it down, squealing and bleeding, onto the pavement in front of you with your fragile and precious pizza delivery vehicle.
You are stunned. Your car is severely damaged and nearly undriveable and lying on the pavement squealing and rolling in agony is the LBL wild hog you have just popped with with your pizza car. What now?
Yes. What now?
If we are going to eradicate the wild (feral) hog population in Land Between the Lakes, we are going to have to come up with a more efficient and less dangerous way of doing that than having the LBL pizza dude assassinate them one at a time with his pizza delivery car. That is not a great method, but seems to be the one in place currently.
This event happened a few weeks ago now and as I understand it, was a widely talked about event at Piney Campground that particular holiday weekend.
Apparently, somehow, the pizza dude managed to maneuver his damaged car to Piney and made the delivery and told the story of the hog assassination. Now what to do?
The hog was dead by the time the unofficial hog patrol got on the scene and the carcass was dragged to the side of Fort Henry Road.
Now, how do I know all of this? Well, this is how it was relayed to me on the Sunday afternoon following the Saturday night hog assassination.
I was driving on Fort Henry Road when I saw a carcass on the side and I could tell it was not a deer and the legs were much too short for it to be a horse; but it was big. I stopped and kinda freaked out when I saw it was a dead hog .. and a big one. I looked around very carefully to make sure none of her friends were around to avenge the untimely and apparently bloody and vicious hog death.
As I headed to the car and had obtained from my ride the cameras I had with me at the moment, a big, white truck with four doors came up and parked and a woman jumped out and the man driver said, “There it is! That’s the dead hog they were talking about last night at Piney.”
“Oh yeah?,” I asked. “What were they saying?”
The man proceeded to tell me the story of how the LBL Pizza to Piney delivery guy — (I have dubbed the ‘Pizza Dude’ , a character from “The ‘Burbs” the greatest movie of all time) — and how the event was the talk of Piney that past weekend.
“It really messed up the car,” the man said.
“It’s a lot bigger than I thought it’d be, ” the woman said. “Let’s get out of here! There may be more around! I be there are!”
I asked the man driving if the hog fatality had been reported to LBL authorities and the man said to his knowledge, it had been officially reported, because the Pizza Dude needed a police report for his insurance.
I noticed the white truck had West Tennessee license tags.
As I was finishing up my dead hog photo shoot on the side of Fort Henry Road, a private car passed, but I noticed the driver was wearing a USDA Forest Service/ Land Between the Lakes uniform and a badge, I think. The person drove by slowly enough I could see and recognize the uniform and they did not stop, or I would have asked some more questions; but with their slow down and pass by, I could confirm that indeed officials of Land Between the Lakes, at least that one, was cognizant of the fact the carcass of a dead, wild hog was lying, still bloody at the tusk, on the side of Fort Henry Road.
I am making sport, a bit, of a deadly problem we have in the LBLUS.com area of Land Between the Lakes.
If you have additional or different information on this topic OR if you were camping at Piney the night the Pizza Dude assassinated the huge wild hog with the pizza car, please chime in.
This Topic of the Wild Hogs of Land Between the Lakes is an investigative story underway by LBLUS.com. It will update.
This was originally published on May 25, 2022
Story and Photos by David R. Ross, LBLUS.com.
https://www.landbetweenthelakes.us/about/usfs/
If the hogs are in the forests of LBL, are they really a “problem,” though, other than the occasional road hazard, the same posed by deer or escaped buffalo? The key is to drive slowly in LBL.
Have wild hogs been spotted out in the county beyond LBL? They may be migrating due to habitat loss and/or climate warming.
They are not native animals, but escaped European wild pigs brought over for hunting long long ago. They escaped and with almost no natural predators left in the area, they have successfully spread out. The biggest issue is they devour many of the food sources of native animals like turkey, raccoons, opossum, and deer. Their rooting up both the woods and agricultural fields alike. And in LBL they do pose a threat to campers or hikers. The females will protect their young and the males are very aggressive if surprised or disturbed. And they can get huge. I have seen one around 4 feet tall and near 6 to 7 feet from snout to tail, with tusks easily 5-6 inches long. They can literally tear you to pieces. If they were native animals, I would say just live with them. But being an invasive species, they should be eradicated in the area.