The Trophy Hunting of Rare and Exotic Animals

Whilst I'm far from being a signed up member of PETA, a Greenpeace flag-waving environmentalist or a tree hugging, vegan hippy some things come across as conspicuously and morally wrong to me. One of these things is the hunting of rare and endangered animals for "sport".

I've made my views on fox hunting clear before now and some of the themes cross over. It’s a subject that’s irked me for some time but some Twitter posts from comedian Ricky Gervais this week pushed it back into my consciousness and prompted me to write this.

Let me start by saying that, yes, I do understand the difference between illegal poaching and licenced hunting. It doesn’t mean that I agree with either and the “it’s legal, get over it” argument holds little sway over me. It’s also legal for you to down a bottle of vodka in thirty seconds, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Sure, hunting as a form of population control is vastly more commendable than tracking down one of those few remaining rhinos in order to desecrate its corpse in the pursuit of money borne off the back of a ridiculous notion that rhino horn will cure cancer and enable time travel. Just this week a story broke that the one remaining male northern white rhino in the world is now under 24-hour armed guard, from fear of poachers. I’m left incredulous.

Once again, I realise that this situation hasn’t been effected by hunters, but by poachers. However, at least they take a certain amount of responsibility for their actions and are very clear in their motives. I’d genuinely have (a tiny bit) more respect for some of these hunters if they just said “it gave me a massive rush to kill a dangerous animal which 95% of the population will never even see”, rather than the painfully transparent “I did it as an act of conservation”.

Take Rebecca Francis, who was pictured gleefully lying next to a slain giraffe. Apparently the animal was “inevitably going to die soon” after being expelled from its herd. Who made you the grim reaper? I’m fairly certain society would have issues with me applying the same principal if a widowed pensioner stepped out in front of my car…

Anyway, the picture was apparently to “honour” her prey. Yeah, I’m sure the animal felt extremely honoured as the round tore through its rib cage and heart; “thanks for choosing me!” Maybe it’s the way that she posed with the dead body like a trophy whilst sporting a huge grin that it should be grateful for?

She was then pictured with a dead lion and bear. No word yet on how they’ve been honoured by a self-important and overly privileged American with a sexism complex and too much time of her hands.

Francis is not alone though and, admittedly, probably gains more attention because she is female. It matters little to me as her actions would be equally deplorable from a man, but another woman produced in the same vein is Kendall Jones. She’s a young cheerleader from Texas with a penchant for murdering exotic and rare animals for no reason too.

No wait, I’m clearly wrong. She’s obviously “doing her part in conservation to make a difference”. Yes, you might think I made that up but that’s what she said in her defence. “Hunters are the biggest conservationists there are” apparently. Clearly the education system can only teach you so much and Texas Tech University shouldn’t feel too bad because you just can’t teach common sense, humility or morality.

These women (and many more hunters I suspect) have been subjected to all manner of threats and abuse. It’s more than a little paradoxical to decry the lack of humanity in killing animals by wishing death upon the perpetrators. I’ve previously written about the irony of the public issuing death threats to people involved in releasing music advocating murder. It’s largely pointless, but one can’t help but imagine a situation where the hunter and prey meet in more natural circumstances.

On a lighter note, I had to laugh at the story (from 2011) of a hunter that tried to finish off a fox with the butt of his rifle only to have the fox hit the trigger and shoot the man in the leg. Karma’s a bitch. Now I await the story of a rare predator which stalks one of these hunters and turns the tables.

TV Talent Shows

Television shows have received a fairly stern assessment from me thus far and things don’t improve much here either. Talent shows are cheap television at its very zenith. I’m referring to the likes of X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent whereby the television company simply hires a stage and invites members of the public to come along and be ridiculed for your entertainment. Average season viewing figures once topped 14 million for X Factor so clearly there are a lot of people who are very easily entertained and it's a great return on investment.

Of course Simon Cowell has forged a very successful career in ad-libbing scathing assessments of peoples’ talent (or lack of), helped in no small way by his creation of X Factor. The real talent on show here is the ability to earn millions off the back of deluded individuals who, while singing in the shower, believe they are the next Madonna with such conviction that they become apoplectic when told otherwise. This is the real entertainment on show; would-be superstars up on stage, in front of millions on television, warbling like a drowning cat. The comical reactions of their doused aspirations often raises a chuckle, but that’s where it ends as far as I’m concerned. You see, in case you didn’t notice, I like to berate things and I like to pick up on the negative (although I see it as more of a skill than a disposition). So when all the misled wannabes are weeded out I see little entertainment. I don’t want to see a bunch of nobodies doing karaoke impressions of Spice Girls songs that were dire even in their original format.

Having said that, I do find it amusing that people have tried to sue for ‘hurt feelings’. Seriously, do they not watch the show before signing up? If your other half invited you to appear on Jerry Springer your first thought should not be “Wow, I’ll be on TV”, it should be “Who are you sleeping with behind my back?” It reminds me of the idiots who sued McDonald’s for burning themselves on coffee. These people should not be allowed to interact with others. Or breed.

Britain’s Got Talent extends the format, I guess, so you can watch people equally bereft of aptitude for anything useful juggling blow torches and doing moonwalks across the stage. I mean, where do these people think it will lead? Being able to spin a glass on your forehead while playing a trumpet might be funny at a party but it’s not much of a career is it? Take that show on the road and you’ll run out of material pretty quickly.

There are many of these Talent franchises around the world, including one in Lithuania (Lietuvos Talentai, if you’re interested), a country which has a population of three million people. Sure, you really ought to be able to find some talented people in there but it’s a bit like Birmingham’s Got Talent. I can imagine after two series the winner will be someone who can eat twelve eggs in ten seconds.

I don’t deliberately watch any of it, but it's occasionally on in the house which means I can't completely avoid it. Clearly, if you have Cheryl Cole and Danni Minogue onboard then it's going to be more tolerable but I still only see it when passing through a room where it's playing. As with many other TV shows it’s hard to avoid in the rest of your life. Women (generally) will want to discuss that “lovely tubby girl from Newcastle with the beautiful voice” for an hour in the office with their friends the next day and don’t dare log into any social networking website the night it’s on TV.

The bombardment of status updates from people outraged that their favourite star-to-be was dumped from the show is suffocating. I suspect, on one particular night after a deluge of them, I didn’t win any extra friends by posting something akin to “Has there been a major international crisis, or did some C-list celebrity just make a decision about a person no-one's ever heard of which, in turn, has absolutely zero relevance on anything important in the real world?”

Oh well, c’est la vie.

Misophonia And My Noise Hatred

It’s true that I’m occasionally irritable and intolerant. Anything which squeaks, rattles or makes repetitive noises is likely to drive me beyond the realms of sanity very quickly. It was my sister who pointed out that I’m not the only crazy person on the planet and that there’s actually a term for it:

"Misophonia, literally 'hatred of sound', is a neurological disorder in which negative experiences (anger, flight, hatred, disgust) are triggered by specific sounds. People who have misophonia are most commonly angered by specific sounds, such as slurping, throat-clearing, people clipping their nails, brushing their teeth, chewing crushed ice, eating, drinking, breathing, sniffing, talking, sneezing, yawning, walking, chewing gum, laughing, snoring, typing on a keyboard, coughing, humming, whistling, singing; saying certain consonants; or repetitive sounds".

Now, I’m not a complete lunatic although I can agree with many of the above examples. In defence of my mental state I'd like to point to the following:

"A Dutch study published in 2013 of a sample of 42 patients with misophonia found a low incidence of psychiatric disorders, with the exception of Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (52.4%)".

I’m well aware of my mild OCD but, hey, maybe it means I have no serious psychiatric disorders. You decide. Here are some real world examples of my irritations:

Work colleagues who constantly hum, sing or whistle have almost felt what having a biro jammed into their ear feels like. Likewise the ones who cannot type without punching the keyboard or are incapable of walking without stamping like they’re on an audition for Riverdance. If you can’t eat your baguette without closing your mouth (and not sharing its contents with me), I’m likely to want to jam the whole thing in your oesophagus. Sideways.

For a period of time I carried a clothes peg in my car. For some reason the car that I used to own would encourage my keys to jingle while driving along, hanging from the ignition. This was infuriating. Chink chink chink chink. That was simply no good, but a well placed peg would hold them together. Problem solved (although I did get some strange looks from passengers on occasion).

My disdain for flip flops is already documented.

My last PC managed to develop a kind of rattle which was a combination of the moving parts and metal casings which didn’t sit together particularly snugly. After stripping it down, tightening everything and, even employing the use of Blu-tac, it continued unabated. Banging it lightly would sometimes provide respite as it evidently moved whatever was making the noise. However it was only a matter of time before things escalated. During one of its more vocal rattling bouts I punched a hole through the Perspex side of the casing. That didn’t stop it rattling so I got a new PC; it seemed the only viable solution.

I once did some touring around New Zealand, which is a stunning country saddled with a speed limit surely designed to protect the native possum population. I hired a car on the north island, dropped it off at Wellington before taking the ferry to the south island and picking up a different car there. I had several hundred miles of travelling on lovely, deserted roads before I reached my final destination (in Queenstown). The driving should have been fun, except the hire car had some kind of bell behind the dash which rang constantly if you broke the pitiful 60mph speed limit. The bell sounded like one you might have above a shop doorway, so imagine that going continually. I couldn’t work out which would send me insane first; travelling slower than one of the glaciers I was going to visit or that bell, accusing me of driving recklessly. It was a strident ringing too, so turning up the stereo made no difference. I could have had Iron Maiden playing live, two feet from the car, and you’d still have been able to hear the bloody bell. Tempting as it was to drive the car off the side of a mountain I just about retained my control (which was remarkable because my anger only succeeded in starting another annoying noise: my girlfriend).

I am better prepared to tolerate noises which are expected, but not ones which shouldn’t be there. The Xbox 360 sounded like a 747 on full thrust when the drive started spinning but I could live with that – it always did it and they all do it. Squeaks and rattles which are not supposed to exist send me apoplectic though. Cars are the very worst place for them to occur and, in the past, I’ve had people hunting around the car while I’ve been driving, searching for the cause of the intermittent rattle which had been digging at me like Chinese water torture.

A few years ago I came close to buying a pair of Sidi motorbike boots until I realised that every person I had seen wearing them squeaked when they walked. The boots squeaked (not the person, obviously) and I didn’t care how good they were after that. I wanted nothing to do with them until Sidi had worked out which bits of plastic were rubbing and sorted it. I’d have taken smashed ankles over sounding like a family of mice at a cheese fair.

The one room in the whole house which has squeaky floorboards is the one which is an ideal size and shape for my office. How can that be? There are six rooms upstairs and the only one with squeaky floorboards is the one I’m sitting in, writing this. And it's not one floorboard either, every bloody floorboard in the room squeaks.

My daughter also squeaks, which can sometimes be annoying although she doesn’t rattle. Well, I don’t think so. I haven’t tried as I’m told it’s bad. Once again though, it’s to be expected so how can I complain? Obviously I do, but with less vehemence than if she was an immaculately constructed £450 bed which squeaks every time you move half an inch. I’m not punching that though, because solid wood is stronger than 2mm of Perspex and I don’t want to sleep on the floor any more than I fancy breaking my hand.