Giles Coren jokingly suggests trophy hunters should become the prey

Yes, Giles, in his Times column today jokingly suggests that a good way to treat trophy hunters is to make them the prey animal and to hunt them to death and then turn them into a trophy (lop off the head and mount it 🤢). I'm pleased to read it because he obviously detests trophy hunters just as I do; as do many others.

Giles Coren. See base of article for the image credit.

So who is Giles Coren (if you don't know)? He is a British columnist, food writer, and television and radio presenter. He is multitalented and very very funny. I think he could be a stand-up comedian; he's that good. His column is always amusing even if he is writing about serious stuff. His latest column, today on April 9, 2024 is, "My modest proposal to cater for the trophy hunt".

He had just spent a fantastic holiday in Botswana in the Kalahari Desert where he and his family spent "a week stargazing, quad-biking and meeting lovely people".

He saw elephants. He writes that, "While we were there, watching baby elephant cycling and whole herds going tonto at the waterhole", Botswana's president Mokgweeki Masisi suggested that he should gift 20,000 elephants to Germany because Germany is one of those countries where the legislature is debating whether to ban the importation of trophy hunt items. The same as happened in the UK.

The fact is that Botswana is the African home of the elephant. There are 130,000 elephants in Botswana. In the world, the entire population is 415,000. Giles Coren makes the poignant point that in 1900 there were 10 million and in 1500 there were 25 million elephants. 

You can only come to the conclusion that humankind is gradually working its way with meticulous precision towards zero elephants in the wild across the entire planet. One day there will only be some elephants in zoos for the kids to look at. I will be dead by then thank God.

But the idea from the president is that elephants are an asset to be used, and in the words of Giles Coren they are "a disposable natural source for them, and they feel entitled to sell them to the highest bidders to do with as they please."

This leads him to the next observation which is trophy hunting and the "sort of sick, heartless, teeny-bollocked dentist from Iowa who would take pleasure from ending any animal's life with his gun..."

I think he is referring to Dr. Walter Palmer who actually comes from Minnesota but who cares. He's a heartless, sick pain in the bum. 

And Coren wants to "turn the cull over to the grotty incels who think slaughtering elephants looks like a giggle, charging them the standard £40,000/head to help the conservation effort, and then let sell licences to hunt THEM (I have capitalised that word for emphasis).

He says that he would be willing to pay £10,000 to "blow the arms and legs of a bloated, sunburnt trophy hunter with a .577 Nitro Express, a large-bore centerfire rifle cartridge designed for the purpose of hunting large game such as elephant.

Yes, I have exactly the same feelings by the way. But then again, as mentioned, millions of other people do as well. It's just great that Giles is criticising trophy hunters in his inimitable way.

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Photo credit: By The British Library - The Fast Food Flood with Bite Back 2030, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125524290

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.