I also understand the desire to be in the wilderness; the thrill of the hunt. It might be exciting to track an animal or to anticipate a chance to shoot...
When it comes to the part where one kills a beast that one really needs not kill, it gets a little more complicated for me. There must be a primal payoff in killing an animal... If not, why not just hunt it and then take a picture? To accept this fulfillment of the need to kill is to acknowledge something very dark about humanity. Whether that is okay is up to every individual to decide. I would never kill an animal; better said, I probably could not, except at the most urgent need (starvation, for instance).
I don't judge hunters. I respect the ones I have known, over the years, for their ethics in following certain codes; or for using the densely populated animals they kill for food and even for the making useful things. What I don't respect is this:
Life is life. This giraffe did not need to die. It is a trophy kill. It's not, as far as I know, food. Maybe someone can tell me whether giraffe is tasty. But, in any event, this picture is not okay. To mock anything in death is horrible. This young woman deserves the response she got, mostly as a result of Ricky Gervais on Twitter.
