An open letter to Carl Knight – last of the great white hunters
Dear Carl Knight,
When I got wind of your courageous exploits, I felt I had to congratulate you. For a start, you are British. We adore the British – they are our second favourite colonialists. The first, obviously, are the Dutch. They gave us the Afrikaners who in turn gave us apartheid. What’s not to love about apartheid, right? Was that the reason your parents moved to South Africa in 1980?
Your efforts to encourage tourism to South Africa in these fraught times are laudable, indeed. It’s not easy these days to find a Brit who is interested in anything other than Brexit and that tawdry harlot, Meghan Markle.
Even though you’re only 46 and hail from Epsom, Surrey, you have your very own company operating out of Johannesburg. It’s called Take Aim Safaris. At first I thought it might be another of those bunny-fondling outfits that think the best way to shoot animals is with a camera. Ha! Poor fools. Unlike you, sir, they have clearly never cradled a 300 Winchester Magnum in one arm and a high-class prostitute in the other.
And you named your eldest son Hunter! You wouldn’t expect a man who enjoys shooting animals in the face to have a sense of humour. Well done.
You spotted a gap in the market. As the plague is still very much with us, people are understandably reluctant to travel. That’s until you reminded them that with fewer hunters around, wild animals have been breeding like, well, wild animals. You can barely walk anywhere in South Africa right now without bumping into an elephant.
So you fired off a newsletter to 3,000 of your clients around the world encouraging them to come here and kill a bunch of stuff for sport. And what a sport it is! Okay, maybe not so much for the animals, but they don’t pay taxes and won’t be missed.
You wrote, “Big elephant and trophy buffalo + hippo, croc are plentiful. The areas are well rested, the animal movement is fantastic.” Let’s see how fantastically they move with a 5.56-caliber bullet lodged in their brain haha.
“I have quota available on the big cats: leopard and lion plus elephant bulls at unbeatable prices.” This is great news. I have never trusted an animal that can’t change its spots. Leopards are duplicitous, violent brutes and I am delighted to hear that they are now on special. Lions, too, will pretend to befriend you, then have your throat out just for the sport of it. They are cats, after all. Did you know this? Or do you simply judge everything with four legs according to the price tag on its hairy ass? Fair enough.
Some of your prices do seem a bit steep. $8 for a guinea fowl? Leave a trail of breadcrumbs into your oven and they’ll cook themselves. $150 for a mongoose? Can’t be much left, especially if you’re using hollow-point ammo. And $75 for a vervet monkey? Daylight robbery, that is. Porcupines are priced right at $300. Even though it’s more of an execution than a hunt, you could still get a quill in the eye if you were very drunk and had to fall on him.
In a recent interview with African Hunting Gazette, you said you shot your first leopard at 16. Impressive! I hadn’t even had my first blowjob by that age and there you were on a wild killing spree. Have you had your first blowjob yet? No matter. It’s the killing that’s important.
I love that you hunted for a Christian drug rehab in the Northern Cape when you were younger. You gave them more meat than they knew what to do with. That’s a David Lynch movie, that is. Produced by Oliver Stone. Featuring a young Sylvester Stallone as you.
You’ve hunted all over – Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe … you even shot a bear in Russia. I suppose he didn’t understand when you shouted, “Hands up! Don’t move or I’ll shoot!” You also said Namibia is a great place to hunt.
“Namibia reminds me of South Africa 30 years ago with its low human population and massive open spaces.” Yep, there was hardly anyone living in South Africa in 1991. An easy mistake to make, what with 40 million people being tucked away out of sight. As for the massive open spaces, well, you had the Group Areas Act to thank for that.
The magazine asked what’s your favourite animals to hunt and you said, “Dagga Boys!” What? That was the name of my gang when I was growing up. But you were talking about something else. “Such an exciting hunt … it’s kill or be killed when you’re hunting buffalo.” So you engage in hand-to-hoof combat with these brutes? Respect, bro.
Our president is also into buffalo in a big way. Mainly for breeding purposes, though. No, I don’t mean … never mind.
Your greatest trophy was the buffalo you hunted with your dad in Mozambique. “It was, and remains, the fulfillment of a father and son dream hunt in a perfect environment.”
My greatest trophy was for tennis in Standard 8. It was tiny but I was very proud. My father never taught me how to hunt. Instead, he taught me how to play pool. The thrill just wasn’t the same, although people did die in some of the pubs he took me to.
You talk fondly of the “38-inch bull in Mozambique that put me firmly on a path I’m still on”. That’s, like, just over a metre? What kind of small-ass bull is that? You might as well have kicked him to death. Anyway, what do I know. I’m sure you believe your wife when she tells you that size isn’t everything.
So the hippo-humpers are saying that many of the animals on your list are endangered. This is nonsense. There are around 400 000 African elephants left in the wild. If you shot a hundred a day, they would last for ten years. That’s not exactly endangered in my book.
There are also 20 000 lions roaming about off their leashes. That’s more than enough lions for everyone. You can get through five a day at least, maybe more if they stop hiding up trees and in cardboard boxes. Sure, their numbers have plummeted by over 40% in the last three generations as a result of hunting, but our national IQ has dropped 40 points in three years as a result of bad education and too much CNN and you don’t see us shooting our stupid people, do you? Damn, this stuff is strong.
Where was I? Oh, yes. You charge £10,000 to shoot an elephant? That, my friend, is a small fortune in my pathetic currency. And £14,500 to put a bullet into the back of a lion’s head? That’s way too much. Are you on drugs? Tell you what. I’ll give you R10 000 for two baby elephants, three monkeys and a crocodile. You do mix-and-match packages, right? And you do pay your taxes, right?
I see you have lived in Joburg for almost your entire life. It’s completely understandable, then, that you would want to kill everything in sight. And you’ve been organising assassinations ever since 2008? Nice work if you can get it.
I see those gerbil-suckers over at MailOnline have been questioning your ethics. How very dare they. You told them, “We eat what we hunt … we love and conserve animals.” I’ve often wondered what elephant tastes like. Tough, I imagine. Do you make carpaccio out of the leopards? That would be a winner among the Italians.
You also told the running dogs of the media that “I have broken no laws”. Good one, mate. You and me and Jacob Zuma know it’s impossible to break laws in this country. Well, you can break them alright, but there ain’t jackshit gonna happen to you.
That bastion of truth, The Mirror, asked how you felt about the dwindling number of wild animals in SA. You said they were lying, which they obviously were, and said, “In South Africa we have over 20,000,000 wild animals bred and conserved here. The birth rate per annum is around 3,000,000.” You might want to check your science, son. I think you’re talking about our people, here.
By the way, my friend Ted said you look like a bit of a cunt. You’ll be pleased to know that I had one of the servants horsewhip him soundly. Your name is Knight, for heaven’s sake. You’re a member of the realm. And I do mean member.
I liked the way you wrapped up your interview with that hunting magazine: “For my family and I, there is no life without God.” There’s a rich vein of irony in there somewhere.
Did you know that if your Boris Johnson had kept his word and implemented the ban on trophy imports pledged in his election manifesto and repeated in the Commons last year, you’d be back in Surrey organising weasel hunts by now?
Our president also has trouble keeping his promises. Politicians, eh? Long may they lie.
- If anyone would like to congratulate Carl on the great work he’s doing, you can reach him on 011-6083999 or 082-7491747. Living as he does in medieval times, he even has a fax number: 086-5378645. His email address is carl@takeaimsafaris.com.
I’m so sorry to hear that you never had or gave a blowjob before you were 16… I am also very disappointed in your hopeless attempt to damage an industry you clearly know nothing about. It does not surprise me that you brought up sex when talking about animals, most of you animal rights are into that type of thing.
If you want to actually learn about the hunting industry and sustainable use I suggest you start researching the subject and you will find that through sustainable use game numbers in South Africa have reached an all time high. But I don’t think you will be interested in facts as fiction seems your forte…
No one will talk your pathetic attemp of harassment seriously, rather pitty a man that obviously has sexual issues.
Yours sincerely
Pam
I suspect that most of my readers are more likely to reserve their compassion for a grown woman who can’t spell complicated words like “attempt” and “pity”.
While I deplore hunting, I think that Peter Apps makes a pretty solid unemotional point when he writes that ‘That without the income from sport hunting an area of wildlife habitat larger than the national parks and reserves will be encroached by subsistence pastoralism and crops. The poachers will clean out the wildlife using methods that really do qualify as “atrocities” and the badly managed livestock and crops will degrade the environment to the point that it becomes useless for anything. The millions of individual animals, of hundreds of thousands of species that used to live in the hunting areas will have lost their habitat, and with it their lives.
When the fundamentalist anti-hunters step up with the resources needed to secure the habitats now managed for hunting will be the time for them to start preaching against hunters, not before.’
It’s very easy to just condemn something, and get all emotional about things – but some critical thinking should also be applied.
I’d love to know what proportion of the R190 000 to kill an elephant actually goes to ‘securing habitats’, land and nature conservation, and how much into Knight’s and politician’s back pockets.
Here’s some additional reading, John:
https://www.saveafricananimals.org/attachments/article/136/The_%20Myth_of_Trophy_Hunting_as_Conservation.pdf
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/trophy-hunting-killing-saving-animals
https://www.europeaninterest.eu/article/busting-myths-truth-behind-trophy-hunting/
https://www.bornfree.org.uk/articles/bth-conservation
https://theconversation.com/trophy-hunting-can-it-really-be-justified-by-conservation-benefits-121921
Hi John… I’ve done quite a bit of research into this, albeit a few years ago and I must advise that virtually no money goes into conservation. It goes into private pockets! (As “suggested” in the IFAW article link below). The conservation argument is just a smokescreen and of course, hard to track. Given that the country has a culture of taking pretty much every cent that is paid into the Tax Revenue system and the voters don’t care because it’s not them who’s paying the tax, (yes… talk about dysfuntional – the people who pay tax and support the country and the lifestyle of the politicians, are the tiniest minority) it would be incredibly hard to believe that people who hunt animals and promote the slaughter would willingly part with any of their money for conservation. They’d just have to make a payment to someone in government to get away with all that cash.
These “people” are from very low-life back grounds and I’m sure they write shit like this to wind us up even though I know they are more than capablo of murdering animals which gives them a kick. It’s to be hoped the gun goes off and blows his evil head off (notice I didn’t say brains!!), and its caught on video for us all to see.
A big man, clearly with a small dick and a pea for a brain. I hope you get hunted down and get a bullet between yours eyes.
Nice!
In my view, the European and American hunters that go on safari in Africa generally fit into one of three categories.
1. The first of these consists of largely misty eyed middle-class white guys reenacting their romantic blood drenched colonial era fantasies based upon the stories of adventure and derring-do found in the pages of the colonial era African hunting books that they read to pieces during their impressionable youth. Books that were written by misogynistic white supremacists whose only major accomplishment was that they slaughtered boat loads of African wildlife both to satiate their own adventurous blood-lust and often made a nice buck through primitive accumulation of capital writ large from the ivory that these glorified market hunters would sell to wealthy capitalist merchants based out of Europe and America after it was hacked straight from the heads of the elephants that they had shot to death with high powered big bore express rifles imported from the finest gunsmiths in merry old England.
2. The second group overlaps with the first in motivation though it differs significantly in the makeup of it’s class composition and largely consists of extremely wealthy ultra-competitive members of Safari Club International (SCI) trying to one-up their rich hunting buddies by shooting ever bigger and rarer animals to enter in the SCI record book, to hang on the cathedral ceilings of their mansions, and to brag about at the annual SCI Convention In Las Vegas. Don Trump Jr. and his younger brother Eric appear to be a prime example of this type.
3. The third group, and very likely the smallest, consists of demented sadists that get their kicks going on an hunt where they can blast the life out of eight or nine different types of animals for the price of one back home. These are the types that butcher entire family troops of baboons because “they just love how they jump when they are shot”* with a small caliber rifle.
*The quote about the baboons above was taken from the out of print book The Hunter is Death by the late English poacher, safari guide and colonial game ranger George Rushby in which he describes a hunt that he guided for a trigger happy American client in the British colony of Tanganyika, now Tanzania.
Nailed it
SHAME ON YOU SHAME ON YOU. JUST HOW DO YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT
.
And there he is they say the devil walks amongst us. His name is Carl !
Let’s do gods work and send him back to Hell!!!
yeah, there’s another devil called Karl…Niehaus, maybe they come in pairs?
Congratulations to Ben Trovato are also in order; he must have busted his balls fitting that many cliches, distortions and downright falsehoods in between the heavy-handed sarcasm.
Unlike you and your fellow hunters, I at least have balls.
Assuming much ? I am not a hunter, but I do have a strong aversion to falsehoods. Why do you need balls to post articles on the internet ? Isn’t that a bit sexist?
What falsehoods are these, then?
“So the hippo-humpers are saying that many of the animals on your list are endangered. This is nonsense. ” Check the IUCN red list.
“Sure, their numbers have plummeted by over 40% in the last three generations as a result of hunting, …” Nope, habitat loss and human-wildlife conflict over lions killing livestock are the drivers of decline in lion (and other big predator) numbers.
“That bastion of truth, The Mirror, asked how you felt about the dwindling number of wild animals in SA. You said they were lying, which they obviously were, and said, “In South Africa we have over 20,000,000 wild animals bred and conserved here. The birth rate per annum is around 3,000,000.” You might want to check your science, son. I think you’re talking about our people, here.” Nope, in round figures thare about 20 million head of the wild animals that people bother to count. As usual everyone is ignoring the hundreds of millions of other vertebrates, and countless invertebrates that share the habitat with the big stuff that people want to photograph and shoot.
Your opinion about Knight and his customers is one thing, the practical realities of protecting habitat for wildlife populations have to take into account the harsh realities of inexorable pressures on land use, and the awkawrd question of where the money that makes wildlife a viable land use is going to come from if the hunters get chased away. So far the anti-hunters haven’t come with either a plan or the resources to secure the hunting areas for non-consumptive use, when they do the unstoppable forces of economics will squeeze the hunters out, as they already have done in the prime wildlife viewing destinations. You could help with that.
WELL SAID 🙂
And your defence of the atrocities being what, exactly?
Take your time Peter.
Cup your balls if you wish and if you can locate them.
That without the income from sport hunting an area of wildlife habitat larger than the national parks and reserves will be encroached by susbsistence pastoralism and crops. The poachers will clean out the wildlife using methods that really do qualify as “atrocities” and the badly managed livestock and crops will degrade the environment ot the point that it becomes useless for anything. The millions of invididual animals, of hundreds of thousands of species that used to live in the hunting areas will have lost their habitat, and with it their lives.
When the fundamentalist anti-hunters step up with the resources needed to secure the habitats now managed for hunting will be the time for them to start preaching against hunters, not before.
Bible: 1st commanmend, look after my creation. You destroy beatifull created animals. May Ps 50 be your follower. And in the big eon you will be judge.
There a way to kill a animal and only for food. You say you serve God, you dont even know who God is. Killer.
Animals have a soul. Soul lies in the blood and blood belongs to Yeshua.
If I am you great next to nothing hunter. Start praying.
Bulls-Eye Ben! Target now pinned firmly on the back of the real quarry. Op jou eie tyd – man met die klein piepie. Ready, aim, fire!
At first I thought Carl is a complete cunt. But hell no. A cunt has warmth and depth. Carl is not a cunt, he’s just a moron with an IQ of an amoeba…
So we all hunt one way or the other whatever the prey – cow pig sheep chicken. So I realise hunting is what man does. What I don’t get with these guys is how anyone with a functioning brain and presumably some degree of an ability to love anything let alone nature, can seriously look at these poor beasts draped inanimately or posed in obscenely unnatural positions – and think ‘this is beautiful’ and ‘wow what a man I am’. How do you even do that when you look through your sights at this beautiful, often endangered, creature and think death is a better alternative. WTF man. Get your kicks some other way.
Listen arsehole, get a fucking real job. This is not a sport. Put your gun down and face the elephant and lion like a man, then we’ll see what short sport they make of you. You are a piece of shit. A brain dead Neanderthal rubbish.
that sums up my feelings perfectly
That’s about right☝️
Bravo Faisel
This bloodthirsty bastard should be shot for destroying our national African heritage…and he has the gall to boast about his and his clients cowardly killing sprees…when no animal can possibly escape his high powered weapons with telescopic sights. My blood boils and I’m seething with rage that he can get away with his criminal hunting activities seemingly with the permission of our corrupt ANC government officials, who undoubtedly benefit financially. His residence permit in South Africa should be immediately revoked as his are crimes against our country.
Make him f…k off back to Britain where hopefully there are more vociferous anti poaching/ hunting lobbies to shame him widely .
Thanks for reality check
Can’t remember you using the cunt word before.
Well done. Very deserving.
You’re a complete fuckwit!!! Lend me one of your high calibre weapons and let’s go play hide and seek. Remember you need to run with no shoes and no clothes so I can see exactly where to lodge that bullet – cowardly bastard!!!
How do we stop a prick like this!!! That saying…. “sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never harm me”….is relevant here. We can profess all sorts of condemnation for this guy and his disgusting business but the truth is, if this guy is not even reading our comments, what’s the point! I this we should get some “sticks and stones” and sort him out!
May the shadow within him diminish, for this will be a far greater reward to those innocents he destroys at a whim . He will then understand the consequences of his choices.
Beautifully presented Ben. Thank you for bringing to light what is hidden in the darkness.
A timely column about this sickening individual – please keep on telling the story, Ben.
Great post Ben, loved it. I can understand culling which is fit the benefit of the animal’s well being and future. But hunting these animal’s just for the love of money and to satisfy the bloodlust of gungho “hunters” is not on. To call these bastards hunters is so far from the truth, they are nothing more than butchers. They must feel bloody chaffed at shooting a defenceless animal while hiding behind a rock,up a tree or sitting in a truck, how brave of them, with their high powered rifles and telescopic sights. Let’s see how brave they are if they were made to hunt with a bow and arrow. As I said previously these assholes are not hunters but gungho butchers. Lastly this practice of trophy “hunting” should be banned altogether worldwide, but we know that will not happen soon as some politician has his finger in the pie.
Shoot the fucker
Brilliantly penned, as usual ~ calling this depraved mother fucking Carl Knight a cunt is way too kind…..he needs a fucking hunting “accident” !!!
You need great courage to take out a porcupine, you big prick
Low as snakeshit! In pragtige Afrikaans: laag soos slangkak!
Ass a Grammarnazi off note, zere iss ein typo in ze vebaddrez fur ze Zafari – it shud be:
https://www.bookyourcunt.com
Fuck off back to England dude, we don’t need people like you here!!!
Trophy hunting is just so 18th century. In a world where wildlife is on the brink in so many places, where climate disruption and loss of wilderness is seriously damaging the biosphere, one has to wonder what useful function people like this serve. What heritage will they leave?
If they need a boost to their testosterone levels, why not wear a massive Blackadder style codpiece, and wave it at the ladies?
Just pathetic.
The true hunters in these “fair games” never carry a gun….
My God ,what a perveted way of entertainy oneself,
I think this guy is a poes maybe he should stare down the barrel of a 300 the brain dead cunt
May the maggots of a million carcasses invade his rectum and digest him from the inside…
I hope you get attacked by a wild animal and you suffer a horrible death you fucking bastard! FUCK YOU!!!!
How is it that poachers are not allowed but this idiot is? Greed is all it is., Himself and the govt who allow and encourage this killing . Tourism.my ass .
Animals deserve to live out their lives. Its their right. And the whole ecosystem will collapse if they dont wake up.
It is a special breed of person that derives pleasure from slaughtering an animal. I thought a trophy was something one earned for excellence, not hiding behind a bush and blowing a beautiful creatures brains out from a hundred meters.
May you rot in hell!
I think your mate Ted was being a bit too kind to Mr.Knight. Maybe in his next life he can come back as a bear in Chinese market, that would be ok by me, until then, perhaps Joberg will look after him….As he deserves.
There are degrees of consciousness, this guy is brain dead
Nice work, Carl.
What a peach.
This bastard should be shot! Ben, where’s that AK of yours that I’ve seen in some photos? Dust it off!
Preferably with a f’king bazooka!