I’m anibivalent. Don’t look that up; I just invented it. Won’t be on google for at least a year. Its like a bisexual where animals are concerned, and their welfare. I love animals. I like to see animals. But I don’t have issues with eating meat, nor fox hunting (foxes are pests and need culling; no-one denies that, its just the methods that are an issue). And I’m aware that animals die in not very nice ways in order to feed our starving population, and so be it.

I think my personal attitude was best summed up a decade ago on a safari in South Africa. We went out and watched the amazing majesty of the herds of zebra and wilderbeast and kudu and springbok, with elephants and lions and giraffes. Wow. Then we stopped in a clearing in the game park and had a barbecue of most of what we’d just seen. The perfect evening.

But I just can’t get my head round ‘big game hunting’. If, say, a dentist from Minnesota went out and fought a lion, hand to claw, to the death, I might be impressed. Going to Zimbabwe and paying lots of people loads of money to arrange and execute the execution of a lion is something completely different. A misplaced act of vanity perpetrated by a rich sadist (all dentists are sadists, they don’t all go the full ‘Marathon Man’ but its in there somewhere). And you have to ask: what is the fucking point?

Ever been to a house with dead animals hanging on the walls? Nice. Tasteful.

Lion populations are down 75% in Africa, (the lion population in Hampstead remains unchanged), in no small part due to tossers like Walter Palmer paying impoverished and illegal trackers to find and kill fabulous creatures. With Cecil’s death, the lead male in the pride has gone, there’ll be a power struggle, the death of his cubs, all sorts of contingent shit going on. It’ll be like the Ukraine out there in the jungle for a while.

Evolution can’t be stopped. Put enough dodos in front of starving Mauritians, who saw them as half a ton of deliciously unflying chicken, and oddly they’re gone. Man is a destructive force in evolutionary terms. But he’s not the only one. An asteroid killed the dinosaurs, the birds ate the bees. In 1000 years time there’ll be no lions. There will probably still be dentists in Minnesota. Unless the lions start killing them and hanging their heads on nearby trees.

Jihadi John is forgotten. Now we hate Walter. T-shirts available right now.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx