Picture this, if you have the stomach for it:

A wild hog with blood oozing from teeth marks in its side and missing an ear rumbles out a chute into a fenced area, like a wounded bull waiting for a matador.

A pit bull bolts out another chute. Stopwatches click. The cheering begins.

In seconds, the dog is gnawing on the slower animal as it squeals in anguish.

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That's the way the state attorney general and officials of the Humane Society of the United States describe "hog-dog rodeos" that have sprung up in the backwoods of the Deep South in the past few years.

The hog never wins -- and it has plenty of opportunities, they say. The same hog may face eight to 10 dogs during one event.

Legislatures in five Southern states, including South Carolina, have taken aim at outlawing these spectacles, which lawmakers view as animal cruelty, a blood-sport that appeals to the lowest element of human nature.

"The whole purpose of a hog-dog rodeo is to mutilate and inflict pain and suffering on an animal," said state Sen. Larry Grooms, sponsor of a bill in the South Carolina Legislature that would ban them.

Defenders of the events say they're not hog-dog fights at all but training exercises -- "field trials" that test the skill of hunting dogs whose job is to pin down non-native swine that even animal rights groups say are pests in the wild.

"This is misrepresented beyond belief," said Mary Luther, president of the South Carolina-based International Catchdog Association.

She and her partner, Art Parker of Fort Lawn, were charged with animal fighting and ill treatment of animals in 2004. A jury viewed secretly taped videos of the events -- and found them not guilty.

Their defense was that the events were dog-training programs, said William Frick, who prosecuted the case.

"There's nothing wrong with sending a dog out into the wild to go hunt a hog," he said. "But when you enclose a pen and you put a dog on one side and a hog on the other side and there's no obstruction in between and you've got a guy that says, 'Go get him'... that's baiting, and that's illegal in South Carolina."

"But the jury did not agree with us on that."

That's why state Attorney General Henry McMaster is pushing for passage of a bill specifically outlawing events in which "awards are given based primarily on the ability of a dog to catch a hog using physical contact in the controlled environment of an enclosure."

He says parents bring children to these events, which often involve illicit drugs and other illegal activities, to watch dogs that have been "shot full of hormones" ripping and tearing hog flesh. He believes the experience sometimes triggers violent behavior in people.

"It's brutal. It's savage. It's cruel to the animals, and it has a bad effect, a harmful effect on the people who participate in it and watch it -- especially young people," McMaster said.

"It lowers their resistance; it makes violence become more acceptable."

Luther says the attorney general and anyone else who has lost touch with where their food comes from should "eat more meat."

"They don't live in the real world," she said. "If you don't know the difference between a dog fight and a hog field trial, a bear field trial or a coon field trial, you need to go back to bed and get up off the other side."

She catches about 20 hogs a year in the South Carolina Lowcountry without using a gun, she said. After her dog pins down the prey, she either ties it up and takes it home to use in field trials or takes out her knife and "field-dresses" it, she said.

"When we get done using them, we put them in my freezer, or we mount them."

In her field trials, she enforces a "three-second count," she said, which means that the dog's owner is supposed to pull the dog off the hog three seconds after it catches the hog with its teeth. Some operators of these events take the tusks off the hogs, but she said she doesn't.

But there's no need to use an enclosure to train dogs to catch hogs, said professional hog hunter Kevin Ryer of Canton, Texas.

"If they're catching the hogs using their teeth to draw blood, that can be done in the fields, free roam," he said. "You can train your dog to do that while you're catching the hogs."

Legislatures in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia all have bills in the works that would outlaw hog-dogging.

The phenomenon was first noticed in the mid-1990s and had become fairly widespread in 10 states by 2004, said John Goodwin, deputy manager of animal-fighting issues for the Humane Society of the United States.

"This particular form of animal abuse is like an infection," he said.

Luther and Parker were organizing events across the country before they were arrested Dec. 17, 2004, as part of a coordinated crackdown in four states, Goodwin said.

An investigator contracted by the Humane Society infiltrated their organization and secretly videotaped hog-dog fights, which were played at their trial in Chester County.

"I cannot imagine how anybody can come back with a not guilty verdict when people are setting pit bulls and American bulldogs on hogs that are trapped in a pen," he said.

But Dr. Ilehr Brisbin, senior scientist emeritus at the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, said he uses pit bulls to catch wild hogs for his studies because they are "the one breed that doesn't hurt the pig very much, if at all."

A well-trained dog can catch a hog with its teeth without drawing blood, he said. "Pig skin is tough."

He testified in the Chester County trial as an expert witness for Luther and Parker's defense.

"I viewed the videotapes, and I saw no excessive or unavoidable pig cruelty," he said.

But not all hog-dog rodeos are so humane, he said.

"I am aware of absolutely horrible events in which people buy wild hogs or catch them and release them in a fenced area and let dogs rip them apart, and that's for the joy of the awful hunters who come down to watch," he said.

Blood sports -- if that's what these hog-dog events are -- are nothing new in South Carolina, said historian Walter Edgar. Cockfighting and "gander pulls," in which a gander was suspended from a crossbeam by its feet as contestants riding by on horses tried to pull its head off, were common, he said.

Gander pulls are no longer in fashion, but cockfighting remains common in South Carolina, law enforcement officials say. It's a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of $100, although officials are pushing for tougher penalties.

Hog-dog fights don't seem to have been a part of the tradition, but they're not much unlike bear baiting, in which a bear was tied to a stake and dogs turned loose on it, Edgar said.

"People enjoyed watching these things," the University of South Carolina professor said. "And people were usually betting on them."

Hog hunting has been something of a no-holds-barred sport in some parts of the Southeast because the animals are considered a nuisance. Their rooting causes soil damage, they compete very heavily for acorns and other food needed by indigenous animals, and they destroy crops, said Tim Ivey, chief of wildlife for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.

They aren't native to the region. Most are descended from hogs that farmers in past centuries turned loose to forage in the woods and rounded up when time came to butcher them, he said.

South Carolina has no regulations regarding hunting feral hogs, so there's no limit on how many hunters can kill, he said.

After his acquittal in the South Carolina case, Art Parker was charged with animal fighting again, this time in Florida.

Travis Trueblood, a Lakeland, Fla., attorney who is defending him, said the events aren't as brutal as they've been portrayed.

"They don't fight to the death. Once it latches onto the hog, they are split apart, and the animal receives care," he said.

The Humane Society of the United States has overblown the description for its own purposes, he alleged. As an example of what he called the organization's extremist position, he points to a section of the Florida state constitution adopted in 2002 that grants constitutional rights to pregnant pigs, "as recommended by the Humane Society of the United States."

Meanwhile, Mary Luther says animal rights activists have dogged her with death threats, and 28 of her 95 dogs are missing. Parker, who is out on bond, is in poor health, and Luther hasn't decided whether to go ahead with hog-dog events she had planned.

"This is domestic terrorism," she said. "There is no doubt."