There's a lot of anti-hunting sentiment out there in the ether right now. I say hunting is fine, but let's just change up the rules a bit. If you want to kill a lion then go ahead - but no weapons, yeah? You've got to use your bare hands. Let's level the playing field - mano a animalo.
You do know that when you guide Sunderland to Champions League glory on Fifa, or topple a fascist regime on Call of Duty you haven't actually done it, don't you? You've just exercised your thumbs a bit - pressed a few buttons. Well when you kill a lion with a gun (or a bow and arrow), you've not really done that either have you? You've just exercised a couple of tiny muscles; you almost couldn't have done less. You shouldn't be proud. In fact, you're a dick. I hope that girl you like reads your Facebook message but never replies, so you see that little 'read' tick and it just sits there eating away at you until you can't take it any more and you have a breakdown in a supermarket, unload all your inadequacies on some hapless shop assistant and then eat yourself into an ice cream fuelled depression before finally turning your fat thumbs and your rifle on yourself.
Oh also hunters, I like how everything in your houses is made of wood. You know it's 2015 now and wood isn't a sustainable source of building material anymore. Still if you're going to needlessly kill an innocent animal you may as well take a few trees with you as well, I mean, what do they do that's of any use to us anyway? Plus, remember what Scar did to Mufasa? Maybe lions aren't that great anyway - so-called 'kings of the jungle' - they don't even live in the jungle. What idiots.
Credit: Gary Larson: The Far Side.
The same applies to other cruel activities such as bull fighting, which sounds quite impressive doesn't it? 'Wow, you fight bulls'? - 'Well we're allowed to use a lance and a sword and have six assistants, but yeah basically I fight bulls'. Ah, ok, so what you actually do is slowly torture an animal until it's weak enough for you to get close enough to kill it with a nice, big, sharp sword. So again, in principle I could be pro-bull-fighting - but no swords please. Get in the ring with it; see if you can get a few punches in, test out your ground game. Go for a leg lock, or rear naked choke. See how that works out for you. If you win, I'll help you mount its head on your kitsch drawing room wall.
These people are clearly psychopaths who have to turn their murderous impulses onto animals that just want to be left to eat, live and avoid humans, because it's not ok to kill people. But perhaps they have these desires wired in and they can't help them, so maybe we should try to help them. Well I have an idea inspired by The Hunger Games (nice one J-Law). These bloodthirsty c-words (I meant 'cretins' - get your mind out of the gutter you cunt) could be shipped off to an island somewhere (we can all chip in to make sure they've got plenty of food and some lovely weaponry to play with - I can probably donate about £7), and they can just exercise their wildest murder related fantasies on each other until they all become extinct.
Think about the potential benefits to humankind if that happened! Sales of cargo trousers and Oakley sunglasses might drop massively but we can subsidise those companies, it'd be worth the money. Fox News might have to shut down due to ratings crashes and women of the world would be free of the sort of men that read Neil Strauss's 'The Game' and think that 'peacocking' is a real thing that works. It's a win-win situation: the hunters would be happy living their lives of barbarism and selfishness without inflicting themselves on normal people, or more importantly, on our dwindling population of wild animals. Cecil's cubs would still have their dad, and a much better chance of survival, and future generations of wild animals might have a chance to prosper, repopulate and ultimately, live.