Big Game Hunting Trips

Written by Mike Spies, The New Yorker ran the article 'How the Head of the N.R.A. and His Wife Secretly Shipped Their Elephant Trophies Home' on July 29, 2021. That would be the executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and CEO Wayne LaPierre, and his wife Susan who also sits on the board of the NRA. 

It led on from the aftermath of the leaked footage from April 2021 of Wayne LaPierre's bungled shooting of an elephant in Botswana in 2013. The footage had been carefully kept secret till this year. It was first published by The Trace and The New Yorker.

The LaPierres are back in the news because the NRA's January 2021 motion for bankruptcy was denied by federal judge in May 2021. New York Attorney General Letitia James has moved to dissolve the National Rifle Association after an 18-month investigation into its activities of financial misconduct and fraud.

The suit alleges that top NRA executives misused charitable funds for personal gain, awarded contracts to friends and family members, and provided contracts to former employees to ensure loyalty.

Seeking to dissolve the NRA is the most aggressive sanction James could have sought against the not-for-profit organization, which James has jurisdiction over because it is registered in New York. James has a wide range of authorities relating to nonprofits in the state, including the authority to force organizations to cease operations or dissolve. The NRA is all but certain to contest it.

I read this with a grim face. I didn't grow up in a society where the culture is all about guns and the killing of wildlife. I've joined hunts (as a child) in the UK for pheasants and foxes; I've hunted wild boars. But I can't stomach hunting a bigger animal with guns. We've pretty much destroyed theses animals' homes, and I can't bear to think that they have nothing left. I can understand the thrill of a hunt, but I'll never understand why people are addicted to it, or see the need to do it regularly. Is there pride in killing a defenseless animal with guns? 

I certainly don't expect less from the executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association (since 1991) and his wife. They are certainly the faces of it, but they're not the only ones. Like any other cause or campaigns, they'll have allies, and strangers who believe in their beliefs and support what they do. This is how we have factions and cracks within a democratic society that is really ironically, not at all equal or meritocratic. 

The LaPierres felt secrecy was needed, the e-mails show, because of a public uproar over an episode of the hunting show “Under Wild Skies,” in which the host, Tony Makris, had fatally shot an elephant. The N.R.A. sponsored the program, and the couple feared potential blowback if the details of their Botswana hunt became public.

The idea of bringing my hunting trophies home is a tad stomach churning. That is certainly not the case for the LaPierres in 2013, or any time during their lives when they participate in these hunts. They identified a taxidermist to help this project of receiving the shipment and turning the dead meat and flesh into permanent trophies as furniture and handbags. Turning an elephant's foot into stools. That's disgusting. But I dunno if it's as disgusting as me using a leather bag. But I supposed sitting on a dead elephant's foot that you had killed is one level up than what I do or would use.  

Taxidermy work orders containing the LaPierres’ names called for the elephants’ four front feet to be turned into “stools,” an “umbrella stand,” and a “trash can.” At their request, tusks were mounted, skulls were preserved, and the hyena became a rug. The episode represents a rare instance in which the gun group’s embattled chief executive is captured, on paper, unambiguously violating N.R.A. rules; the e-mails show that Susan directed the process while Makris’s company, Under Wild Skies Inc., which received millions of dollars from the N.R.A., picked up the tab.

The ban on big-game hunting has sparked off a ton of discussions, and whole new controversies. You can read it and decide for yourselves. It's all about what humans choose to do, if they respect the sanctity of wildlife, or they feel that without the money of big-game hunters, wildlife habitats will be turned into human habitats. Either way, conservationists wring their hands and find their loyalties divided and sorely tested. 

At this point, my political views have consolidated and settled. We don't get to choose our friends' families. But our friends get that choice, and we get to choose our friends. I cannot imagine being good friends with extreme Republicans (and its equivalent in all countries) who are also advocates for the right to use guns, and the right to hunt. And worse, willing to pay a lot of money to organize big-game hunting trips in third world countries to decimate their wildlife. Even when such a trip is legal and fully-permitted, they don't sit well with me. (This isn't anything like hunting for wild boars.) And of course people who go for those won't care what I think anyway.