Whenever I see one of those photos of ‘hunter’ sitting by dead prey holding his (or her, as animal murdering is definitely egalitarian and non-discriminatory) rifle, I feel a bit sick. And today there’s a photo in the paper of Mark Bristow doing just that. Mark and dead zebra. Mark and dead buffalo. Mark and dead leopard. Nice. Holding his gun and dressed in ‘camo’. Cool.

The issue is that Mark advises a ‘big cat’ conservation organisation on certain days of the week, then goes out shooting those big cats on others. That way there’s no conflict of interest. His argument (all THEIR arguments) is that by paying licensed people to shoot big game, he is in fact injecting much-needed cash into the animal conservation and anti-poaching system. And at $100k a big animal, its a lot of money. There’s also the ‘culls are needed to protect the whole environment’ argument, much favoured by fat white men with big rifles.

Yet all that, true as some of it might even be, is mere justification. It’s trying to find a reason that is socially acceptable to defend the indefensible. Those reasons are not WHY they do it. They’re just, in their mind, a context which allows them to do it. They’d do it anyway.

My concern is the minds of people who want to kill animals, just for ‘sport’. Though any definition of any sport involves some form of ‘competition’ and zebra vs high-powered, telescopic-sighted hunting gun at 1000 feet is simply not a competition. Why not use a fucking tank. Oh, because then the money shot (man and corpse) wouldn’t be so good with half an elephant’s brain distributed around the hunter’s feet.

I’d really like to know what motivates a (presumably) clever man, the CEO of a Footsie 100 company, to want to kill defenceless animals. I need to know where the pleasure comes from. If he fought elephants, hand to… errr… hand to trunk, then I could see both sport and some kind of warped reasoning. Fighting a lion with your bare hands; that’d separate the men from the conservationists. But at least I could understand that a bit.

If you have a child who kills insects and small animals on a regular basis, you have a problem. You have a potential psycho on your hands and you rush to a child psychologist for help. Because killing things just because you really want to is not in any way normal. ‘Game hunting’ is the same behaviour in rich, (always) white, adults.

Lock ‘em up.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx