This is Why Killing A Lion Is The Most Cowardly Thing You Can Do, And Anyone That Says Otherwise Is Wrong.
Melissa Bachman has caused a huge controversy posting this picture on her boasting about killing a male lion in South Africa. Due to the relaxed nature of a resting lion she literally pointed a gun and shot – like a true coward.
Bachman is a TV host who presents hunting programs on tv. She recently posted this photo on her twitter page alongside the caption:
“An incredible day hunting in South Africa! Stalked inside 60 yards on this beautiful male lion….what a hunt!”
She was hunting in an official and legal South African game park, but she did not point out that the lions can be shot at whilst simply laying down, like the big cat that they are, and do actually spend a great proportion of their day sleeping.
The fact that she claimed to be ‘stalking’ the lion effectively means that she was taken out on the park in a van with an expert guide. These guides know where to find the big cats – often laying around huge clusters of the prey that they are hunting themselves, such as buffalo.
These lions are not threatened by a van approaching and often not stir at all. So this lion that Bachman is displaying like a huge trophy could most likely have been dozing under the shade of some trees.
Is it not the ultimate act of a hunting coward to therefore shoot an animal in such a state – especially such a grand and magnificent animal like a lion ?
Whilst not officially endangered, it is believed that most lions in the world now live in eastern and southern Africa, with their numbers there are rapidly decreasing, with an estimated 30–50% decline per 20 years in the late half of the 20th century. Estimates of the African lion population ten years ago ranged from between 16,500 and 47,000 estimated to be living in the wild, a figure which is down from early 1990swhen estimates ranged from as high as 100,000 and perhaps up to 400,000 in 1950. It is widely acknowledged that the primary causes of their decline include disease and human interference.
Habitat loss and conflicts with humans are a significant threats to the species. The remaining populations are usually geographically isolated from one another, which then leads to inbreeding, with the resulting reduced genetic diversity. Therefore the lion is considered a vulnerable species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, while the Asiatic subspecies is already classed as endangered.
The reaction to Bachman’s tweet was overwhelmingly negative, with people saying they were “disgusted” and enraged by Bachman’s tweet, and her account has since been deleted. Support has been growing for her to be penalized for her actions (i).
Sadly though, this is not the only recent hunting controversy to hit social media. People are currently trying to get facebook to ban Kendall Jones, a 19-year-old from Cleburne, Texas, who hunts endangered animals and boasts proudly of her sick exploits on her facebook page (ii).
Jones boasts that she has been hunting big game in Africa since she was 13 years old. When she’s not hunting, Jones is a cheerleader for Texas Tech University saying of herself “I am from the great state of Texas pursuing my adventures in hunting. I am looking to host a tv show in January 2015″.
Some of the photos that she posts on her page are gruesome and utterly sick as most of them involve Jones proudly posing over bodies of recently killed animals such as lions,leopards and rhinos. She implies that her involvement in the needless butchering of these animals is justified by saying she is with vets who are part of conservation projects. In the last week the ‘likes’ on her page have massively increased with many of the comments are a mix of similarly thinking hunting fans and disgusted animal rights activists that have discovered the page.
More than 40,000 people signed one online petition started in response to her page, demanding Facebook remove it. Jones defiantly wrote “All the anti-hunters posting negative comments and sharing my photos on their page has helped me get over 600 likes in the past 48 hours”.
However as of today a lot of content has been removed from the page.
Jones now thinks she can get round this by starting up a new page called Support Kendall as she wants her voice to be still be heard. At the time of writing this page has been live for 2 hours but already has just under 10,500 likes! (ii)
There is also another online petition initiated by a South African citizen, which has been signed by more than 1,000 people(and rising), asking the South African government to ban Jones from the country.
Here’s some typical posts from Jones on facebook:
The problem doesn’t necessarily lie in the fact that she is a hunter but in the fact that she is hunting seriously endangered animals. Is Jones any better than a poacher? She may not look like the vision most people have when the word poacher is mentioned but this is a needless trophy sport and we all need to draw attention to this tragic abuse of animals.
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