Hundreds of years ago when Spanish conquistadors came to the Americas. They brought pigs with them, hogs.

Over the hundreds of years that have elapsed since then, the hogs have been taken and bred into domestic species,

the feral hogs have interbred with those domestic species like the American Yorkshire,

and today there are now more than 6 million feral hogs,

still running around 35 different states.

But neither of the feral hogs nor the domestic pigs

look anything like their long lost Iberian ancestors.

Except on a small island off the coast of Georgia, Ossaba Island, where one population of hogs remained almost completely isolated

for 500 years.

And as a result, the Ossaba hog is almost identical to those original hogs that were brought over from Spain.

And this unusual genetic makeup, it opens up this whole world of possibilities, culinary possibilities, scientific

possibilities. So you'd think something as unique as the Osaba hog would be

protected. But in fact the opposite is true. They are being

hunted and killed by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, the DNR. And there was a point

where it really looked like this unique hog, the Osaba hog, might disappear altogether.

And then a ragtag bunch of scientists got together and they pulled off something that was a little crazy not quite legal

they did a hog-heist.

I'm Dylan Thuris and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Last year, Atlas Obscura reporter Diana Hubble wrote this

incredible James Beard Award-winning feature for Atlas titled

Saving the Hogs of Ossiba Island. Today Diana is joining us to tell us all about it. She's going to tell us about the

great hog-napping of 2002 and how it resulted in the last time a genuine Osaba hog would make it to the mainland alive.

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