Trophy Hunter Accuses Ricky Gervais of Targeting Women on Social Media
Ricky Gervais’ Twitter feed is populated mostly with images of two things: wild animals and the people who kill them. A longtime animal-rights activist, the British comedian and actor has turned his online presence into an aggressive campaign against hunting, which earned him the Humane Society’s 2015 Genesis Award for social media.
Gervais has taken aim at plenty of male hunters—including Ian Gibson, who was trampled to death by the elephant he was hunting in Africa last week—but one of his targets says he disproportionately puts women in the crosshairs.
“What must’ve happened to you in your life to make you want to kill a beautiful animal & then lie next to it smiling?” Gervais recently captioned a photo that was retweeted more than 43,000 times: hunter Rebecca Francis lying in a grassy field next to a dead giraffe.
The tweet inspired a flood of criticism against the hunter, including many comments that used gendered language to propose violence against her. Numerous tweets suggested Francis, the 2010 winner of the reality TV show Extreme Huntress, should suffer a fate far worse than the giraffe she killed.
“Ricky Gervais has used his power and influence to specifically target women in the hunting industry and has sparked thousands of people to call for my death, the death of my family and many other women who hunt,” Francis told the website HuntingLife.com last week. “It shocks me that people who claim to be so loving and caring for animals can turn around and threaten to murder and rape my children.”
Gervais, who was named PETA’s 2013 Person of the Year, took to Twitter to deny Francis’ claims of sexism, instead insisting that the men and women who hunt are equally “vile & worthless.”
The anger over women hunters isn’t particularly new. The college cheerleader and wildlife hunter Kendall Jones was called the most hated person on the Internet last summer because she posed with the wild animals she killed. The year before that, critics launched a Change.org petition to keep lion hunter Melissa Bachman out of South Africa. At the time, Gervais weighed in by comparing Bachman to a word that rhymes with hunt.
Related stories on TakePart:
• The Surprising Fallout From Trophy Hunting for Wolves and Bears
• The Trophy-Hunting Cheerleader From Texas Now Has Her Own Show
• How Lily Raff McCaulou Learned to Love Hunting Her Own Food
Original article from TakePart
