AA Gill (Jeremy Clarkson's friend and restaurant reviewer for The Times) has shot a baboon for fun. It's not the kind of thing you expect to hear, but it's true.
When I first heard about this (through Twitter of course), I'm proud to say that my reaction was one of perspective and good humour. People shoot other humans for fun sometimes, or because they've been told to by a vengeful or greedy government, or they shoot elephants for ivory, or drop cats from multi-storey carparks. Unless it's a large-scale tragedy or something that affects your own day-to-day life, if you get upset about all these little things you'll end up mad.
It's the kind of thing that provokes a series of jokes rather than proper outrage, as it probably should do if you just hear the sentence "AA Gill has shot a baboon for fun." Baboon is a funny word, for starters - how can you not ridicule a story that contains the word 'baboon'? It sounds like balloon.
But if you read the offending article, where AA himself (Christ knows what it stands for and I'm not going to look it up) tells us all about his baboon-shooting experience, it's impossible to stay calm for long.
It's his attitude that bothers me the most, like he did the whole thing for an amusing anecdote, thinking he's oh-so-clever and terribly rebellious and everyone will love him for it. He blames his bloodlust on the fact that he was wearing a hat (not quite as funny as Jedward's "our suits were too red" excuse, but twice as deadly), and describes the whole thing as "naughty fun". Sigh...
Of course, anyone who complains about this will sound like a "tiresome and predictable animal lover" (quoting one of the comments on the Times website), but ho-hum. Ending a life because you think it makes you funny, or it gives you a sense of power, is pretty tiresome and predictable too.
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