An influencer huntress

Merelize van der Merwe , a 32-year-old South African, boasts more than 83,000 likes on Facebook and says of herself: “ Hunting is not something I do, it’s what I am”. More than five hundred , she claims, the animals she shot to follow a passion that she has carried with her since adolescence. Among them also tigers, lions, zebras .

On her page, which we deliberately do not link to, the fervent hunter keeps her followers updated on her “exploits” . Among the most recent there is one so macabre that it has unleashed a shower of indignant comments .

On the eve of Valentine’s Day she was in fact reached by a news she had been waiting for for years: she had obtained the authorization to kill a huge giraffe , for a payment of 1,500 pounds. In the video posted on Facebook, not suitable for the most impressionable people, you can clearly see the magnificent specimen collapsing to the ground, shot down by a shotgun.

But that’s not all because the huntress, after having posed smiling with the corpse, extracted the animal’s heart in favor of the camera , as a gift for Valentine’s Day. Following these shock images, a petition was launched on Change.org asking Facebook to delete her profile.

Faced with the critical – when non-violent – reactions of users, van der Merwe defended himself by accusing them of hypocrisy , claiming to know Africa much better than them and recalling having contributed to a school project with his detailed description of the heart of the giraffe.

Trophy hunting, a controversial practice

Technically, what the South African influencer does is called trophy hunting . It is a practice regulated by the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) which provides, in fact, to kill specially selected large animals including elephants, bears, giraffes, rhinos. The trophy in this case is precisely the animal that the hunter can keep as if it were a souvenir.

The rules of the CITES require that at the base there is a slaughter plan aimed at preserving the balance between wild species. The staunch defenders of this practice also argue that it represents a source of income for the local population and an incentive for the conservation of the ecosystem .

Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is radically opposed . “Trophy hunters and those who earn their living by selling hunts and accessories like to claim that they kill animals in the name of ‘conservation’, but there is no it is ‘conservation’ in the hunt for the trophy; only cruelty and corruption ”, writes the animal rights organization in a note.

The balance of the ecosystem – he continues – is maintained by virtue of the very functioning of the food chain , certainly not due to the intervention of man (who, on the contrary, disturbs it, killing the most impressive and healthy specimens). Even the proceeds end up in the pockets of a few large landowners , certainly not the poorest sections of the population; a recent undercover investigation in South Africa also demonstrates this.