Sunday Times restaurant critic AA Gill revealed in his column yesterday that last week he shot dead a baboon in Africa.
He writes: “So there was this big bloke leaning against a rock, picking his fingernails, a hairy geezer sitting in the sun with his shirt off. I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways. I’m told they can be tricky to shoot: they run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one.
“A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. We paced the ground. The air was filled with a furious keening of his tribe. Two hundred and fifty yards. Not a bad shot.”
A spokesman for the international Fund for Animal Welfare told The Independent: “Baboons might not be in the same league as endangered elephants but that’s not the point. Even if the world was overrun with such animals, it is not for a journalist to make the call of culling them.
“Management of animal populations should be left to people with specialist skill and knowledge, and not to restaurants critics with nothing better to do with their time.”
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