Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy.com (a domain registrar service) is a dick. Apparently he has gone to Africa at least twice to shoot elephants. Parsons says this is a ‘good deed’ because the elephants he shoots are ones which have been ‘identified’ as ‘problem elephants’ that trample crops, break fences, etc. The farmers are in danger of starving, reasons Parsons, therefore they need people like me to come to Africa like a rich white hunter, pay a fuck of a lot money (60-70k Parsons estimates) and shoot the elephant and then put a video of it on You Tube. Parsons derides anyone who criticizes him as guilty of ‘PC bullshit.’
Bob Parsons fails to mention that elephants probably see the problem differently. If elephants had publicists, they would probably point out that because of economic disparity among humans in Africa, the poor continue to expand into wilderness areas. “We are not trampling their crops,” the elephants might say, “They are planting their crops on our feeding grounds.”
Most of the agriculture currently being performed in Sub Saharan Africa is unsustainable: the rate of development and the rate of soil depletion spell long term disaster for both elephants AND humans. But Mr. GoDaddy wants to get his rocks off by killing elephants while pretending that shooting elephants is an act of charity… so he really isn’t interested in ‘helping the humans’ of Zimbabwe — there are a lot of ways he could do that without shooting elephants — like financing sustainable agriculture initiatives in Zimbabwe that would address soil depletion and allow farmers to keep farming the same soil without having to pick up and move every couple of years… or electric fences, scent fences, electronic noise makers and other forms of non-lethal elephant repellant. If he’s just a humanitarian who just wants to kill elephants for humanitarian purposes, why doesn’t he hire AN AFRICAN to kill the elephant? But no. Like many super-rich sick fucks, he wants the thrill of doing something that very few people can afford to do.
Rather than a video of Bob Parsons shooting an elephant, I’d like to see a video of an elephant stomping Bob Parsons into the ground.