Big game

[urbpan]

Some good discussion developed on Facebook (of all places) when I posted a link to this: http://deepseanews.com/2013/02/this-is-why-we-cant-have-nice-things/


"Why is it that we seem to have moved away from celebrating images like the one above left (a big game hunter posing over a dead African lion) yet seem to have no problem with the the image above right (a fishing party with their 1,320 pound dead Blue marlin caught off Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean)?...Why do we seem so resistant to seeing fish (marlin, shark… whatever) as wildlife?"

Or the way I put it: Is posing with a dead, hunted predator tacky/classless/unacceptable? What if that predator was a fish?

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I think urb_banal has it; I think it's a cold-blooded/warm-blooded bias, and maybe also on top of that a familiarity thing: we walk the same ground as the lion, but we don't swim in the water with the marlin.

But yeah, as everyone is saying, they're both pretty horrible because they show people delighting over a creature's death--and not a creature that was threatening them in some way, but a creature they set out to destroy unprovoked, as it were.