Normalizing Hatred and Hypocrisy: The Con-selfserving-ationists of the UK's Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting (and those who agree with them)
By Hank's Voice
The celebrity led, UK based, Campaign To Ban Trophy Hunting (CBTH) must not be making enough money from selling their ugly T-shirts and peddling their even fouler lies, as they're amping up their antics again, desperately hoping to hoodwink a gullible public and government into believing that legal hunting is the demise of African wildlife.
The CBTH is fond of using buzz phrases such as "hunters kill for fun."
To enjoy hunting does not equate to "killing for fun."
Hunting is a complex experience that encompasses much more than just the act of killing.
Most hunting outings don't even result in a kill.
Ozzy Osbourne, an anti-hunting spokesman and supporter of CBTH, apparently flippantly enjoys the thrill of a kill.
He publicly admitted to spending his pandemic lockdown time shooting all the cats and birds that wandered onto his property. He called it "good fun" and said, "When I started this thing, I could not shoot. Now there's dead cats and birds every minute."
Hmm….
Master baiters of the clickbait kind, the CBTH's most manipulated media source is The Daily Mirror UK, a tabloid that has been sued multiple times for libel.
Interestingly enough, it claims in its community standards (published by its parent company, Reach plc) that it does not allow hate speech or engagement in personal attacks.
Here's a sampling of comments on threads related to stories featuring legal hunters in Africa. Keep in mind, as you read them, that The Daily Mirror describes its community as "a big dinner party where everyone's welcome " and it commonly sensationalize hunters by describing them as bloodthirsty and "sick."
These are some of the things commenters (anti-hunters) would like to do to legal hunters:
"nail their testicles to a wall"
"stick elephant tusks in their rectums"
"torture them with duct tape and a drill while they're sleeping"
"tie them to towbars and head for the nearest motorway"
"put them in woodchippers"
"pull their teeth out with pliers"
"put bounties on them"
"rip them apart with dogs"
"drown them in shark cages with only a snorkel"
"castrate them with no anesthesia"
"wish terminal and painful diseases upon them"
"show up at their homes to attack them", and so much more.
These haters claim not only would they like to hunt hunters, but they would pay to watch it. Or to watch a lion eat a hunter alive in a small, confined space, gladiator style, sans any weapons.
And their bloodlust extends to the family of any hunter as well, even going so far as to claim that if a hunter wanted to do something useful, they would shoot their own children.
Wow! Some online "dinner party"! These guests obviously prefer human flesh as the main course, served rare.
And, with a heaping helping of hypocrisy as the side dish, they claim hunters should get psychological help as hunting is a mental health disorder.
Surely, misanthropic, sociopathic, and sadistic statements against other humans are more likely symptomatic of such.
Or obsessing over someone's penis size, as they often do. They also describe hunters as cruel, wicked, attention-seeking lowlifes, obviously creatures suffering from low self-esteem and self-hatred, and, unfortunately, sick individuals.
What an introspective, ironically self-applicable comment! Very appropriate for such internet goons who constantly invoke "karma", claiming what goes around comes around.
Careful what you wish for there!
These people also claim to be concerned about animal welfare. Yet some state they would prefer hunters beat animals to death with their fists and hunt wildlife with wooden spears instead of guns.
Hmm….
Cries of legal hunting being "colonialism "abound. How wonderfully hypocritical from people attempting to dictate what independent African countries can choose to do with their own renewable natural resources.
They claim to be annoyed that governments are aware of legal hunting, yet they do nothing about it.
Wrong.
In 2020, over 50 community leaders, representing millions across southern Africa, did indeed "do something about it".
They wrote an open letter, via Resource Africa, asking UK-based celebrities to stop using their privileged influence to undermine the human rights of impoverished people and jeopardize wildlife conservation in their countries; representatives from Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
Haters even suggest that game wardens should shoot legal hunters. Shooting those who significantly help fund your salary is generally not helpful.
Yet ignorant critics insist that local people never benefit from legal hunting.
They assert villagers should only ever farm their own food supply instead of enjoying legally killed game meat, in complete ignorance of the fact that habitat loss due to land conversion for agriculture is problematic for wildlife in many ways.
They claim it's a great day when someone gets mauled, and suggest that if there are any conflicts between humans and wildlife (which there commonly are), the villagers should be killed instead of the animals.
According to them, "wildlife should only ever be shot with a camera, and why can't we just leave all the animals alone?"
"They're not toys. They are loving friends and neighbors, whose sole use should be entirely for our viewing pleasure."
This is a fantasia-type dreamworld supported by CBTH campaigner Chris Packham, who urges anyone who is a fan of the musical score in The Lion King or has watched Disney's Dumbo to please help him banish trophy hunting.
Note that this individual holds a Bachelor's degree in Zoology from the University of Southampton. One sincerely hopes animated children's films were not considered core curriculum material there.
But then again, Chris's commitment to conserving publicly beloved, iconic animals only runs so deep anyway.
In 2009, the self-acclaimed BBC "wildlife expert" stated that giant pandas should be allowed to go extinct as it was too expensive to try to keep them.
Perhaps that's how he also feels about the enormously costly, often hunter-funded programs attempting to keep Africa's white and black rhinos from fading into history?
Let 'em die! It's cheaper!
Indeed, some high-quality, handy people are supporting the CBTH!
Eduardo Goncalves is almost awarded hero status for his 'superpower' of "exposing" secrets about hunters.
A rather dramatic and overendowed image of someone who merely spends time reading publicly available books, records, and documents, and then regurgitates the information in his own books, with the proceeds funding himself and his follies, of course.
Priscilla Presley is invoked as a force to be reckoned with, someone who is really going to save Africa's wildlife from evil hunters with her "blistering" campaign.
Yet her activism has primarily been focused on Tennessee Walking Horses (not even remotely an issue in Africa) and the dog meat industry in South Korea, where she used, in a protest, dead dogs as props that a local veterinarian had euthanized.
And Jane Goodall, the high priestess adored by many, but tellingly scrutinized by few, unfortunately.
She was involved in a plagiarized book scandal in 2013, abandoned her four kidnapped research assistants to rebel forces who overtook her Tanzania research camp and then refused to pay their ransom, and now is critical of the US government pulling USAID funding for her Hope Through Action project designed to protect endangered chimpanzees and their habitats in western Tanzania, USD 29.5 million over 5 years.
Someone like this should understand that Africa desperately needs all the funding it can get for conservation, including revenue from safari hunting, whether she likes hunting or not.
She claims legal hunting is depleting animal populations; it isn't.
One might ask why her beloved chimpanzees became extinct in three African countries, with their overall population numbers declining from supposed millions to below 340,000.
They're not legally hunted.
Then there's Nada Farhoud, the environment editor at the Daily Mirror.
The CBTH clowns must really enjoy her help in advertising their circus, as although she's purportedly a winner of awards for her journalism, her anti-hunting bias is evident in the propaganda she writes for them.
She excels at crafting typical tabloid sensationalistic titles.
You know, the ones that make you not even bother to read the full story or to seek the truth?
A fascinating tidbit emerges when you search for the awards she has won.
One mention is that the African country of Ghana is the largest recipient of the UK's old clothes.
So many that she discovered a toxic textile mountain that threatens the health of 40,000 of Accra's (Ghana's capital) most vulnerable citizens, killing some women who attempt to carry 55kg of the UK's cast-off clothes to make 80 pence a day.
Perhaps the UK should focus more on its harmful exports to Africa than benign imports?
This same article, from The Press Awards website, contains the following shocking quote: "The UK is now ranked 228th out of 240 countries and territories in the world for nature depletion. Only 53% species of animals and plants remain, far below the global average of 75%".
Hmmm….
Perhaps the UK should get its own house in order instead of trying to meddle in Africa's affairs?
Instead of fretting over a relatively small number of African hunting trophy imports each year, perhaps Nada should focus on stories about senseless killings or injuries of wildlife in her own country that don't and can't contribute to conservation?
For example, the 1,355 animals reported to the RSPCA in 2024 alone that were entangled in sports netting (many fatally), or the estimated hundreds of thousands of animals that die as roadkill each year in the UK.
However, one could easily assume that unless a person genuinely cares about conservation, it's much easier and more enjoyable to persecute legal, regulated hunters online.
These attempted shame campaigns by the CBTH and their supporters honestly only accomplish the exact opposite of their intent, shaming the ignorant persecutors themselves.
They think tigers and jaguars are native to Africa.
They cannot make the critically simple distinction between poaching and legal hunting.
The CBTH has existed since 2018, and seven years later, they still do not fully discern the difference between captive-bred and wild lions.
Odd considering one of their major supporters, The Born Free Foundation, raises donations from keeping big cats in captivity – ones that weren't born free and surely aren't going to die free either.
And yet they somehow feel entitled to dictate what Africa can do with its wildlife, to dismiss scientific proof of conservation through hunting, to prioritize their wants over African residents' needs, and to use celebrities as their mouthpieces.
Overpaid entertainers with megaphones, not boots-on-the-ground people dealing with the daily conservation grind in remote African wildlands.
The people who are directly impacted by actions, not the ones who move as malignant mobs on to the next misinformed, manufactured internet hate-fest.
As one rare commenter sagely said, however, shut up, it's life!
Your crying on social media won't solve anything. Nor will attention-seeking, con-selfserving-ationists, grandstanding in UK government halls.
So, what does any of this have to do with PATROL, a publication that focuses on anti-poaching operations?
Well, anti-poaching work is fundamentally animal welfare; these animal rights activists clearly don’t take that belief to heart.
Africa's wildlife, wildlands, and people deserve far better.
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