‘The Ugly American’ Model Now Comes Packaged as 12-Year-Old Utah Girl

Standing 18', the giraffe is the world's tallest mammal. It weighs up to 3,000 pounds, but that doesn’t hinder it from being able to gallop at 35 mph. The giraffe is a gentle herbivorous giant, with sweet doe eyes, who lives in several areas on the African continent. And today, there are as few as 80,000, while the human population in Africa totals 1.2 billion (and growing fast).

In 2014, a shocking 40 percent drop in the giraffe population from 140,000 in 1999 was reported. The now usual suspects in the decimation of our world’s wildlife were noted for the giraffe too, including poaching, population growth and migration in conflict zones. PBS Newshour reported that the giraffe is poached for its brains and bone marrow, which locals mistakenly attribute to healing properties for AIDS and HIV. Human overpopulation in Africa means a growing footprint (taking of land for agriculture, living space and infrastructure – roads, bridges) for Man and continuing loss of animal habitat, including, for the giraffe, areas of acacia trees, their main food source.

Knowing just those few facts, how could anyone consider killing such a creature?

Enter the “trophy hunter,” who adds to this animal genocide. These are people who kill wildlife for “fun and recreation,” with a faux veneer of conservation (their mantra: “you have to kill to conserve”) and a feeble nod to “feeding the locals” with their kills. Unfortunately, America accounts for a disproportionate number of these killers, who prize Africa for the exotics native to the continent and take advantage of economically challenged countries. Between 2005 and 2014, Americans imported more than 1.26 million “trophies” to the U.S. from their worldwide slaughter. Put another way, that’s 1.26 million sentient beings killed for pleasure.

Increasingly, women and children are joining in this activity. British journalist Piers Morgan recently interviewed a 12-year-old girl, Aryanna Gourdin, from Utah and her father, Eli, trophy hunters both. The girl posted several photographs on social media of her with numerous dead animals, including a wildebeest, bear, zebra and a giraffe. The photos generated outrage across the world.

As an American, I am ashamed that we must claim the Gourdin family, and their fellow “trophy hunters,” as Americans. In the world we have now created – a world that has seen a 50 percent loss of wildlife in just the last 40 years, because of us – any parent who teaches a child to take the life of another living creature for no reason (killing for killing’s sake) is a complete and utter failure as a parent.

Increasingly, those who engage in these activities (including the Trump sons) – and who bring attention to themselves with photos of themselves gloating over taking innocent lives – are being publicly shamed. This brings more awareness to the crisis in our wildlife numbers, but it seems to have little impact on the trophy hunters themselves who are killing rare animals – becoming increasingly rare by the day.

The mild-mannered dentist by day, lion killer by night showed no remorse about the killing of Cecil the Lion last year, and his wife couldn’t understand why her comfortable life had been disrupted. This child, easily indoctrinated by a parent, vows to continue to kill wildlife, and has been invited to join in a lion hunt, along with a widely castigated couple who stabbed a bear with a 7 ft. spear and simply left it to bleed out – two more stellar role models for the child.

During the Morgan interview, Gourdin’s obstinacy and that of her father was writ large on their shirts, which had the words, “Stand Up to Anti-Hunting Bullying” – the two obviously oblivious to the fact that you can’t really claim bullying when you’re the one with the guns and arrows killing defenseless animals – plant eaters, no less.

That those who kill animals for no reason than their own pleasure – to hang a head on a wall or have a stuffed animal sitting in a room – are completely tone deaf to the criticism indicates hubris, corrupt values, immorality and willful ignorance of the era in which we live: the Sixth Extinction, the greatest loss of species since the dinosaurs.

They are perpetrators of crimes against sentient beings who have as much right to exist as Homo sapiens. Yet even with the legitimate outrage directed to them, they have so little critical thinking ability to even try to analyze or understand the criticism directed their way. The level of insight into the world and the value of other living beings seems to register at zero.

The overwhelming majority of people on the planet cannot conceive of murdering an elephant, a tiger, a lion, a rhino, a giraffe or a zebra – all animals seeing declining numbers. So it’s up to us – this majority – to create a shift in thinking so that it becomes culturally, morally and politically unthinkable to engage in this behavior.

Maria Fotopoulos writes about

the environment-population connection.

Find her on Twitter @TurboDog50 and

Facebook @BetheChangeforAnimals.