I was thinking about murdering baboons

It’s early morning in the hills of South Africa and the fog has yet to burn off and the men are breathing heavily in their camouflage and Indiana Jones costumes. A black man in hunter green and a bright red hat seems to know his way around and he’s pointing into the distance saying look over there and that sort of thing. About six hundred yards away a group of baboons are running along a cliff side and there seems to be a lot of them which is very exciting news for the hunters as you can probably imagine. As the camera zooms in from over their shoulders you can just make out the shapes of the scrambling baboons but the image isn’t very high quality so they look like poorly animated blurry pixels. Y’all better shoot ’em one guy says, they’re gonna move. You shoot the one on the right I’ll shoot the one on the left let’s go. At first they miss and there’s an explosion of activity as the baboons run for cover. There’s one on the horizon Rob you see him, one guy says to Rob, big one coming down, there he is, he says, then Rob shoots and the baboon tumbles off the side of the cliff like King Kong falling off a building which is an image that occurred to me because they have it written in the video intro and in the title and in the description on YouTube three different times. Highlight of a predawn mountain climb & hunt was a baboon falling off a cliff like King Kong it says.

I watched another baboon get assassinated just now on a video. This one was in South Africa too. There’s a family of boars foraging around in the foreground and the baboon rolls up into the frame looking left and right to make sure the coast is clear and he climbs on up this fallen tree and sits down and crosses his arms and legs sitting there with great posture like you would when you’re in the little place they put you before you’re about to go into a job interview. The group who posted the video run package hunting tours where they’ll take you out on trips like this one so you can respect animals and they’ve got all the costs broken down for you in a handy chart that tells you how much it is for a hunter guide and a ride from the airport and for them to go collect the giraffe you shot and turn it into a trophy. Children under five are free to come along but ages five to fifteen are $150 a day they say. So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God their website says.

The baboon is sitting there and they’ve put some dramatic soft-listening piano music on the video like you’d hear in a life insurance commercial about how you’re a deadbeat if you don’t plan for your kids’ college tuition before you have a stroke and the gun goes off and it sounds like a weird distorted snake hiss or snare drum with too much reverb and the baboon falls over and its mouth opens in a scream like what the fuck and the boars start running like shit they’re about to do it out here and the voices off camera all laugh and slap each other on the back saying things such as nice one mate then the camera pans back and back and back and back and there’s a guy 850 yards away laying on his stomach looking through the scope of a rifle. Eight hundred fifty yards is so far away. You would have no way of knowing there was a baboon or anything else 850 yards away if you didn’t have a tool to show you.

I have to admit it never really occurred to me that hunting primates was a thing people did. I guess I assumed there was some sort of unspoken agreement we had with other primates about shooting them to death like how in baseball they have unwritten rules where you don’t bunt when there’s a no-hitter in play due to sportsmanship. But they say baboons are pests and they need to be culled in a lot of places in Africa because they fuck with people’s crops and such. I don’t know if that is true or not because people always turn the things they want to kill into pests in their minds to make it easier to do. Some scientists said a couple years ago that 300 types of mammals including 126 primates were in danger of being hunted to extinction if we didn’t stop fucking around. I guess one of the things that got them to thinking about that was how lions were starving because they didn’t have enough other species around to hunt for themselves. Sometimes baboons will eat other primates too is something I learned.

I was thinking about murdering baboons because I just read a news story where an Idaho Fish and Game Commissioner named Blake Fischer was catching a bunch of shit about doing it. Some other hunting officials in the state were suggesting he step down not necessarily because he went to Africa and killed a family of baboons, which he did, but because he took photos of it and shared them with a bunch of people and that sort of thing makes responsible hunters look bad they seem to think which is correct.

He and his wife went to Namibia and they killed enough animals to get a good start on Noah’s Ark or at least a moderate-sized zoo that you would bring your kids to and get depressed about the whole thing when they got disinterested and made you buy them chicken fingers. It was his wife’s first trip to Africa and his third and she wanted to see him hunt he wrote in an email boasting about the trip according to the Idaho Statesman.

“So I shot a whole family of baboons,” he wrote under a photo of the pile of primate corpses he attached. “I think she got the idea quick.” Steve Alder of Idaho for Wildlife told the Idaho Statesman the photos troubled him due to they are the equivalent of doing a bat flip in baseball I gather or celebrating too much after you score a touchdown. “The biggest thing is the baboon thing. I was really troubled. That’s my biggest issue. He killed the whole baboon family and you’ve got little junior laying there in mom’s lap. You just don’t do that,” he said. “I hate wolves as much as anyone, but I’m not going to take a wolf family and put it on display and show the baby wolf,” he said, which makes me wonder what wolves did to him but he didn’t specify.

About three years ago something tore inside of me and I don’t know what it is and I can’t make it go away. I was running and then the next thing I knew I was on the ground and it felt like my entire upper right abdominal had detached from my musculature. I walked back the rest of the way once it died down. It would come and go sometimes over the next few months like one time when I went to see Michelle getting her hair cut at a time when we both wanted to disappear and I asked to use the tiny bathroom in the tiny salon she was in and pushing to take a shit made me keel over in agony paralyzed and embarrassed and I was worried they were going to have to come carry me out of there to the hospital and my dirty ass and balls would be hanging out and it would probably leave a bad impression with her hair stylist which is an important relationship for a woman to maintain. I decided a little thing like that wasn’t going to stop me from running or lifting weights for another year after that so I kept doing that until it started to hurt every day and I had to stop doing anything but sit here and sit here and sit here.

That doesn’t have anything to do with shooting monkeys I don’t think but I was lying there earlier thinking about it on the table at this guy’s regular ass suburban house with needles sticking into my legs and back pumping electricity into my muscles to motivate my body’s own healing abilities like when you have to get a jumpstart for your fucked up Camry in the parking lot of a sad mall. He’s a nice Chinese fella and his house always smells like fried meat and his wife asked me not to park in front of the neighbor’s driveway one time because I’m guessing they had gotten rip shit about it in the past. Sometimes other people come in when I’m lying there and I can hear him bending their spines and they do a little whimper that breaks your heart.

I just saw a tweet from Fox News and here is the tweet:

“Antifa attacks again—swords and vandalism at New York GOP office”

The far left Antifa strikes again the reporter said in the piece. The guy in the video they showed waving a sword around is Gavin McInnes the leader of the Proud Boys who were the ones any Antifa types would have been there to stand up to. Got to think Fox could’ve spotted him since he’s been on there so many times but maybe they just made an honest mistake.

Some other stuff that happened that night were dozens of Proud Boys jumped some people and kicked the shit out of them yelling things like faggot and so on. McInnes was in New York to speak at the Metropolitan Republican Club which is a gathering spot for respectable conservatives which just means you believe all the same things the extreme right like the Proud Boys do but you are more polite about it. One of the gags he was performing there was the recreation of a Japanese socialist leader being assassinated with a sword.

I saw a video someone posted of the attack. They swarmed around the guy who probably had no idea they were coming and next thing he was on the ground. Then they posed for pictures proud of what they’d done.

Donald Trump likes to drop references to Antifa into his speeches. In an August 2018 meeting with a group of Christian leaders he warned them about the violence that would be forthcoming if Republicans lost the midterms which they did pretty badly it turned out.

“You’re one election away from losing everything you’ve got,” he said. “They will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently. And violently. There’s violence. When you look at Antifa, and you look at some of these groups, these are violent people,” the president told the religious people.

It echoes the type of rhetoric used regularly by the NRA.

“They use their media to assassinate real news,” Dana Loesch says in one video I watched at the time. “They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse ‘the resistance.’ ”

“All to make them march. Make them protest. Make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding—until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness.”

People like Fox News and the NRA and the president say Antifa and the left are a menace and a threat and need to be stopped before it’s too late because they fuck with people’s property and freedoms and such. I know that isn’t true but people always turn the things they want to kill into pests in their minds to make it easier to do.

Three people were arrested in relation to the fights and eventually they got in some trouble on account of the fascism they had gotten up to and last thing I saw was that everyone was ostracizing McInnes and his wife in the fancy neighborhood they live in and he was getting pretty red-assed about that and was threatening to sue the Southern Poverty Law Center for calling him a racist or whatever but that’s not my problem.

Fischer, the Idaho Fish and Game Commissioner, stepped down from his post not too much later after being asked by the governor to resign. “I recently made some poor judgments that resulted in sharing photos of a hunt in which I did not display an appropriate level of sportsmanship and respect for the animals I harvested,” he said.