Thousands Sign Petition Against Trophy Hunter Who Proudly Posed With Heart Of Dead Giraffe

Thousands Sign Petition Against Trophy Hunter Who Proudly Posed With Heart Of Dead Giraffe

Thousands Sign Petition Against Trophy Hunter Who Proudly Posed With Heart Of Dead Giraffe. image: (Merelize Van Der Merwe/Facebook)

Thousands Sign Petition Against Trophy Hunter Who Proudly Posed With Heart Of Dead Giraffe.

A TROPHY HUNTER has come under fierce criticism after posing with the heart of a giraffe she had just shot dead. Merelize Van Der Merwe, 32, and her husband spent £1,500 (€1,730) to make her dream come true on a trip to a South African game park.

She posted a number of photos on Facebook of the hunt including one in which she is proudly holding up its heart and captioned the image: “Every wondered how big a giraffe’s heart is? I’m absolutely over the moon with my big Valentine’s present.”

Van Der Merwe’s photos have sparked fury among animal rights activists, she argued the killing of the 17-year-old giraffe aided conservation efforts. She added the kill “created work for 11 people that day”, and “a lot of meat for the locals”.

She also wrote, “If hunting is banned, animals will become worthless and will disappear. Hunting has helped bring back a lot of species from the brink of extinction. The only people protecting these animals are trophy hunters.”

Animal rights groups refute her claim that hunting helped save threatened species with Born Free Foundation telling The Mirror: “Trophy hunters’ claims they are concerned about wildlife conservation are highly misleading. Trophy hunting is not a conservation tool, nor does it contribute significant funds to local communities.”

Van Der Merwe said she shared the pictures of her hunt online to taunt activists whom she referred to as “mafia” she had no respect for.

She plans on using the animal’s skin as a rug, saying: “I’d waited years for my own perfect bull – the older a bull gets the darker he gets. “I love the skin and the fact it’s such an iconic animal for Africa.”

However, it has been reported by The Sun that an online petition has since been launched which is aiming to have Van Der Merwe permanently banned from Facebook for sharing such disturbing images. The petition has already been signed by more than 30,000 people and says, “Why does Facebook, a supposed site with family values, allow this? Instead, they should do the decent thing: Ban her.”


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Tony Winterburn

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Comments


    • Howard Williams

      28 February 2021 • 21:55

      The remark by the Born Free Foundation was made by Dr Mark Jones, their head of policy – he is an animal rights fundamentalist and ex-director of HSI, another organisation that makes millions of $$$$$ per year misleadingly out of pictures of animals it doesn’t actually save. Born Free Foundation has saved only a handful of lions, while South African game farmers have raised up to twenty million wild animals (including 10,000 lions) and established forty million acres of natural habitat without a penny in donations or subsidies. The animals on the game farms are all increasing in number. And this doesn’t contribute to conservation???
      The giraffe was an old stink bull, raised on a game farm to be hunted or meat. The farmer who raised it sold it to a hunter. It was harvested. It wasn’t one of the animals in the National Reserves – they are not hunted. It was not endangered – there are 26,000 of them and farmers can raise as many as you want. The hunt was legal and it was eaten afterwards. Its skin will be a rug and its bones made into knife handles. Nothing is wasted.
      It had a long and happy life in the sunshine, protected from predators and poachers. He was killed unawares, and fell senseless onto his own shadow with the first shot, then euthanised at short range with a .450 Rigby rifle. It had a better life than “wild” giraffes who live a tense life, wary of predators, and whose death is invariably slow, degrading and agonisingly distressing. His long life and quick, humane death was much better than cattle raised in a shed then trucked to an abattoir.
      Animal Rights, on the other hand, is a mad philosophical invention that has no place in real life, and eating an animal raised in the bush is greener than killing all the wild animals and ploughing up the bush to plant vegetables.

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