Sunday Times restaurant critic AA Gill revealed in his column yesterday that last week he shot dead a baboon in Africa.
He writes: “So there was this big bloke leaning against a rock, picking his fingernails, a hairy geezer sitting in the sun with his shirt off. I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways. I’m told they can be tricky to shoot: they run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one.
“A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. We paced the ground. The air was filled with a furious keening of his tribe. Two hundred and fifty yards. Not a bad shot.”
A spokesman for the international Fund for Animal Welfare told The Independent: “Baboons might not be in the same league as endangered elephants but that’s not the point. Even if the world was overrun with such animals, it is not for a journalist to make the call of culling them.
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“Management of animal populations should be left to people with specialist skill and knowledge, and not to restaurants critics with nothing better to do with their time.”
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