Readings...

Getting a sense of "what it would be like to kill someone" - from a restaurant critic - the kind who might sometimes say you need to personally kill what you eat.

I shot a baboon in Africa, last Wednesday, just after lunch. Shot it dead. Those of you of a nervous disposition should look away now. This article contains graphic scenes and may upset the sensitive. But it doesn’t contain flash photography, so while it may make you froth at the mouth, it won’t make you bite through your tongue, jerk about on the floor and wet yourself.
   ... So, I said, why not? Just a little one. I can handle it; I’ll be a recreational primate killer. Now, baboons aren’t stupid. Well, no stupider than Piers Morgan. They know that bipedal hominids in hats, hanging around in trucks with guns, are up to no good. They see you, they sod off, in great gambolling gangs, babies riding their mums like little jockeys. And then they stand around on rocks and bark like alsatians and jump up and down, mooning with their big meaty arses, like a lot of Millwall supporters down West Ham. Ha! But neither baboons nor Piers Morgan are smart enough to have invented telescopic sights. 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.

I know perfectly well there is absolutely no excuse for this. There is no mitigation. Baboon isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard. The feeble argument of culling and control is much the same as for foxes: a veil for naughty fun. They might, at some unspecified theoretical future date, eat birds’ eggs, young impalas and dik-diks — they are opportunist omnivores. You wouldn’t trust one to baby-sit. But then everything has to eat. I noticed that, when it was alive, I thought about the baboon as a thing. Now he’s dead, I’m posthumously anthropomorphising him, and that was one of the reasons I killed. I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger. You see it in all those films: guns and bodies, barely a close-up of reflection or doubt. What does it really feel like to shoot someone, or someone’s close relative? But, as so often happens in life, when you stare into the magnifying glass at a profundity, it’s the prosaic and pitiful that’s reflected back. He looked much smaller dead; the elegant and nimble black fingers were terribly human, with their opposable thumbs, just a couple of stops down the Metropolitan line of evolution. I examined his fingernails with the same surprise and awe I did when my children were born. And then you look in his mouth, and there’s the difference. One of the most ferocious gobs in all the wild, incisors the size of a leopard’s. “Some local people say it’s ill luck to kill a baboon,” Josh mentioned. Yeah, right. And which one of us looks like he’s having a bad hair day? (via)