“Hardcore huntress” stirs up controversy with legal lion kill

We can’t help but wonder whether Melissa Bachman, an American television personality of minor celebrity, thought would happen when she posted a photo of her holding a rifle, grinning wildly with the lion she just  killed carefully posed for the camera.

“Incredible day in South Africa,” she Tweeted after visiting the the Maroi Conservancy, adding: “Stalked inside 60-yards on this beautiful male lion – what a hunt!”

The photo, which was uploaded to her Facebook and Twitter accounts, caused such a storm of controversy she quickly deleted some of her social media presence. (For those with a strong stomach, peruse her Twitter account to see a variety of creatures she has killed.) But the lion photo just seemed to be too much for animal lovers. The backlash against the self-described “hardcore huntress” has exploded online. There’s the Stop Melissa Bachman Facebook page for example with its 332,000 “likes.”

The Conservancy, which arranged the hunt, came to Bachman’s defence on its Facebook page, which has since vanished from the Internet:

“We are not apologising for facilitating the hunt. As for all the negative commentary towards us, please consider how much you have contributed to conservation in the past 5 years. If you are not a game farmer and struggling with dying starving animals, poaching and no fences in place to protect your animals and crop, please refrain from making negative degoratory comments. It is so easy to judge if you are staying in cities and towns, buying your meat at ‘woolies’ and going to game reserves maybe once a year.

But some people are taking aim at South African laws as the real root of the problem for allowing trophy hunting.

h/t National Post Photo Twitter

About the author

Recovering newspaper reporter.

Comments

  1. Why is where we buy our meat relevant to this story? is she planning to consume the flesh? It’s not like she shot a gazelle and is sharing the meet with the community. That would be different. This is trophy hunting of a vulnerable species. For the love of god, locate your moral centre.

  2. My god does anyone realize what we do as humans to everything..! We take it or kill it or use it up.. Please stop and grow up and understand these things deserve our protection not our weapons. Hunting anything is so easy today with the incredible guns we all can get cheaply. There is no “Sport” factor here. a Sport is a competition… you have to have some level of fair play and an even playing field for it to be sporting.. The shit these people call hunting is a joke, they use BAIT… I always thought that was sleazy.. They can hunt at Night… They have big spotlights and flash them on to create confusion and then they let loose with the gigantic 500 nitro or 413 Weatherby or a whole host of massive guns that make a so called hunt a “JOKE” and a pathetic example of what some people think is fair play. Something wrong with people who can do this to an animal that already lives under our control and at our whim to begin with. Your already superior in every way that can kill the thing… so why Kill it ? That is the cowardly and least human thing to do to it.
    450,000 Lions… Pre WW2… but then the new large commercial Airplanes developed from the Bomber designs of the war made overseas flights child’s play by 1946… the jeeps and British land rovers made driving into the gigantic continent child’s play as well so that by 1950… the thousands union thousands of humans who wanted to do what the Old Time Macho Men did like Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway and the Early Hollywood Movies with guys like Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn sold as being a “Man’s Man” the canned safari trips… animals picked out and at time they were staked to trees for the ladies to shoot if they were not good shots… and they could take shot after shot until the bullet finally hits the spine or the head and the blood flies and the body drops.. Wow… now that’s a SPORT. how fun! the Lion’s were decimated almost like the Buffalo.. 450,000 dropped to 45,000 by 1950..! Imagine… In only four of five years we brought the Lion population down to 10% of what it was for a the thousands of years before this time. That is Gluttonous.. There is no word for this kind of stupidity… and wasteful reckless greed. If you see an old Lion mounted in some museum the odds are it dates to this era…! 400,000 Lions alone were killed in those few years. ! The Africans are corrupt but not totally stupid they knew their natural resources were being exploited so they began charging more and more to hunt, Soon only the wealthy could do this anymore. SO it’s status symbol of sorts for these people. They can show up the big game hunters here in the Rockies or Alaska with a trip to the Dark Continent and bag a Lion. game parks were started for tourism and it slowed the deaths to what they are now. in that time the Lions are down to around 21,000 that is about 4% of pre war populations now and it should never drop below this mark. The government does nothing to help the local people in most cases… the parks help more than anyone for medicine and food at times…. They do nothing for birth control and the human population keeps rising and pushing out more and more game areas… and the starvation and murder rape and slavery still continues on. Hunters pay fee’s to the corrupt government officials but they do NOTHING.. and I mean NOTHING for the animals… in fact like in CECIL’S case. they poach animals from the parks by baiting them and setting up Night Hunts just off protected lands. And they all tell everyone what great things they do for wildlife and pat themselves on the back and make trophies for themselves. Show me an honest hunting guide and show me how you saved an animal by Killing one, and I will show you the sky is not the same color for you as it is me.
    Someone talk some sense into this next generation. Hunting is fine if you use the meat… every once in a while I get a craving for the tenderloins of a deer.. and so I get a permit and go fix my fix. Lots of deer, so many they can starve in bad winters up north and often do. But I do not want to go Hunt a Moose and take it’s head or a Bear… and I think it should be outlawed. To Take a Trophy head is wrong… it must stop. Id say as nutty as this sounds. The poachers are more honorable than these rich kids and these guide hosted canned hunting jokes… at least the Poachers are risking their lives by getting shot if they get caught and the money is often spent on local people unlike these rich kids trips. . The hunting is the same result you just have permits and the money for the government to let you do the same god damned thing as the poachers do… you get the best advantage you can… and you take the shot. end of story no romantic bullshit just killing. Is it fun to go hear the last heart beat and feel that last breath…?… if you think it is so beautiful then tranquilize it… and go lay down by it and call that your triumph.. get pictures of your conquering the mighty Lion… and let it get up and live! Why do you have to take its head? Jesus Christ grow up and evolve a little will ya. No one is loosing our human strengths. I had to kill in war not to long ago… it is something that is OK to do when called on to do it but it is a nasty business and you should never act like you like it.. even if your sick and you actually do… The guy’s I met like that had a screw loose… bad genes, hope they don;t pass it on. So I still think trophy hunting is just wrong on so many levels. I hope someone who does this see’s the light and takes a camera with them the next time they get the amazing opportunity to go over there.

    That was long sorry…

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