AA Gill, a restaurant critic in England, said he shot a baboon on safari “to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone”.
In his Sunday Times column, he described in painful detail how he shot the primate from 250 yards away while riding in a vehicle “full of guns and other blokes” in Tanzania. He shot the male baboon through the lung, saying he felt the urge to be “a recreational primate killer.”
He wrote: “I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways. I’m told they can be tricky to shoot: they run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.”
This is perhaps one of the most morally indefensible things I have ever heard someone do to an animal — and then brag about it. If he wants to know what it’s like to kill someone, perhaps he should also know what it’s like to go to prison for the rest of his life for doing so.
I doubt charges will be pressed from a continent away, which means in his mind (and mine) he will have gotten away with murder. There’s something not right about this person. I hope he has at least ‘shot himself in the foot’ and will lose his job with the Guardian Times. Sick minds like this don’t deserve media space to boast about their cruelty.
According to the article in the Guardian Time, Guy Norton, who studies the behaviour of baboons in Makumi National Park in Tanzania, said baboons are “sentient and feeling animals” and display similar characteristics to humans with strong parental bonds and sociable group behaviour.
How sad that some humans are so cruel.
