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A slightly deranged pastime
I WAS pretty sure I'd know what to expect when I tuned in to Louis Theroux's African Hunting Holiday on Sunday, but, as ever, his strange subject matter took some unexpected detours.
The programme tracked Louis' trip to South Africa, where "hunter farming" is huge business, and animals are bred solely to be killed by tourists.
Frankly, it seemed like a chance to laugh uncomfortably at rich, trigger-happy Americans who fancied themselves "big game hunters."
I have to admit, I'm no fan of the idea of hunting for fun. I've no problem with the old fashioned hunter/ gatherer motivation, but spending hundreds or thousands to bag a giraffe or lion for sheer pleasure sounds pretty loathsome to me - a slightly deranged pastime for would-be Ernest Hemingways.
And, sure enough, these "hunters" bore little resemblance to the real thing.
There was no painstaking stalking, or battles of wits between predator and prey. Everything remotely romantic about using a high powered hunting rifle to plug a grazing wart hog was removed from the equation right from the start.
At best the tourists were driven to a location where the animals could be found milling about, and at worst they simply sat in a shack and waited for a pig to walk in front of their rifle.
As Louis got the keepers to confess, the odds are pretty heavily stacked against these poor beasts. Think David Beckham taking a penalty kick into mile-wide goalposts guarded by a comatose keeper. Not much of an achievement.
The holidaymakers thought otherwise, though, and after a successful day's killing, there were more high fives and backslaps than you could shake a stick at. One lady, who admitted getting teary when her husband bagged a zebra, even took a shot. But as her husband exploded with excitement at seeing the antelope's blood spurt, Louis got her to quietly admit the experience had left her feeling queasy.
Louis himself lined a hog up in his crossbow sights at one point, before deciding against pulling the trigger.
"I am not feeling an urge to do it. I am feeling an urge not to do it," he told a disapproving hunter, who noted that the filmmaker was happy to eat animals killed by other people.
What Louis was most interested in, though, was the respect - affection, even - the "hunting farmers" seemed to have for the animals they bred to die at the hands of paying customers.
One, Lolly Furie, was visibly distressed at the thought that one of his animals may be limping off, wounded, to die a slow and painful death.
Another, Piet Warren, threw his toys out of the pram when Louis asked about the morality of the "sport" for the umpteenth time. After ranting about what it meant for the area's economy, Piet argued that the practice meant endangered species were being kept alive, when unregulated poaching probably would have wiped them out long ago.
Of course, he also admitted he hated elephants because they ate all the nice looking trees.
It was a rather odd conclusion to a programme that was a bit horrifying, but grimly fascinating nonetheless.
11:02am Tuesday 8th April 2008
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