Newsweek online recently had an article about some “well-heeled” hunters either unknowingly or uncaringly going big game hunting at some game reserves in Zimbabwe that are owned by the wife of the dictator, or his cronies, and thus contributing to the money pocketed by the corrupt over there.

There were two photographs accompanying the article: the first was of a woman with a dead leopard slung across her shoulders, blood dripping down her white shirt and green pants right down to her boots. The other was a fat white man next to a giraffe, who was kneeling with its legs folded under, the long graceful neck turned delicately toward the man, head lightly resting on the ground.

It was dead, and he killed it.

Who kills giraffes? Shouldn’t he be embarrassed that he shot to death an animal that poses no threat to ANY other type of creature? Is he going to eat it? Is he going to mount the head on his wall? A giraffe head?

You can’t make a giraffe look mean. You can’t taxidermy it into wild ferociousness, like you can a bear. You can’t turn its big gentle eyes into slits of attack, or file it's straight-across teeth into fangs. Why on earth would you shoot a giraffe?

Because I can, that’s what I think he’s thinking. I am a rich white guy from America of Europe or South Africa and I can shoot anything I want to so f**k off.

Killing animals seems to be just an extreme form of bullying. Trophy hunting seems so, Teddy Roosevelt. Everything that’s alive is, well, alive. Why does the fat white guy get to live and the giraffe gets to die? Doesn't the earth have too many fat white guys and not enough giraffes?

The other picture was possibly more jarring. I guess I still think that women possess the kinder, more nurturing aspects of humankind, but to see that perky blonde smiling with this carcass draped across her was just sad. Couldn't she just go mano-a-mano on the golf course with her male colleagues? Does she have to murder a beautiful and ellusive animal to show that her balls are big brass ones? What can she say about this: “Oooo, I just love to kill things!” Perhaps she doesn’t care that leopards are endangered everywhere in the world: “Well, it’s only one…”

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