I’ll never understand people talking about “the thrill of the hunt.” What thrill? These animals, no matter what they are – tigers, lions, elephants, whatever – aren’t in on it; they don’t know they’re being hunted. You’re a football field or more away with a rifle, possibly a scope, and you shoot it while it rests or eats, it’s not a real “man vs beast” struggle. It’s just some d-bag wanting a new Facebook profile picture.

If you want to make it into to something, some life and death struggle, go after these animals with your bare hands. That is, of course, absurd because they’d be killed. So take a knife. If you take down a lion with a knife, good for you. That will impress me. If you make it slowly bleed to death after hours of excruciating pain as you follow along a trail of blood because you need a story for your friends, you’ve lost me.

Again, I’m not saying it should be outlawed, though I’d probably vote for that if we had trophy animals here like there are in Africa. I’m just saying I don’t understand the urge. These people aren’t feeding their families with the meat – given how they dropped tens of thousands of dollars to kill these creatures, they don’t have a problem doing that.