We want to thank retired Illinois power plant executive Guy Gorney for conserving so much exotic wildlife over his long career as a trophy hunter. By his own count, the dedicated conservationist and animal lover has conserved something like 70 different big game, including elephant, lion, leopard, rhino, and buffalo.
In a 2015 radio interview, he explained the appeal of rifle-based conservation.
“I like pitting myself against these animals. And what greater trophy than an elephant?” he said.
He added that he had a hard time understanding why he got a different reaction to the photos he has of himself with game he bags in trophy hunts in Africa compared to the hunting of more common animals back home.
He told the broadcaster: “I have a hard time understanding [why] if you have a picture of somebody with a deer, nobody seems to care. But if it’s an elephant, it’s a big problem. If it’s a lion – especially now – it’s a huge problem. But to me, either way, I’ve stopped a beating heart.”
There it is, stripped to its essentials, and a guy like Guy can’t state it more plainly. When you cause traumatic injury to an animal’s essential internal organs with a high-velocity projectile, what matters is that you end up with a dead animal. And then you can enjoy life as it was meant to be enjoyed. Like the time Guy put a zebra in his automobile so he could send this humorous photograph to his friends back home…
Imagine how much the zebra would enjoy this image if it weren’t dead. Zebras are known to have the driest wit on the savanna.
Anyway, Guy has become somewhat notorious in recent days when a 2011 video surfaced which showed him line up with a rifle on a tripod to shoot a sleeping lion. Guy was somewhat criticized publicly for this particular act of animal conservation.
“I felt physically sick watching the video, and I wasn’t alone,” Piers Morgan wrote in a column for the Daily Mail. “To see such a magnificent beast lying fast asleep in its natural habitat as it was shot dead has reduced many who’ve seen it to tears of shock and anger.”
In other words, as plainly as Guy has spoken on the appeal of trophy hunting, he is still tragically misunderstood. And so loudly and persistently too.
Like a beating heart.
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Posted by Tony Ortega on March 31, 2019 at 20:00
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Tony Ortega is a journalist who was formerly the editor of The Village Voice. He’s written about Scientology since 1995, and in May 2015 released a book about Scientology’s harassment of Paulette Cooper titled ‘The Unbreakable Miss Lovely,’ and more recently a compilation of his stories, ‘Battlefield Scientology.’ He continues to monitor breaking developments in the Scientology world, as well as other subjects at The Underground Bunker. You can reach him by sending him a message at tonyo94 AT gmail.com (Drop him a line if you’d like to get an e-mail whenever a new story is posted.)
