Hunter Shaming is a Real Thing; Kendall Jones Will Not Be the Last Target

I sat at the bar in Dallas, Texas, a few months back, enjoying an adult beverage with a fellow hunter and gun owner. We were deep in conversation. One of the best conversations any grown man can have. We were finalizing the glorious details of a possible trip to Africa. Which caliber would we take? What were the possible plains game species we would target? The list goes on.

Before long a college-age young lady decided to interrupt our fun. She clearly had been drinking: red eyes that carried a vague look of desperation and what seemed to be a partial lack of fine motor skills. She looked a bit like the living version of a Lindsay Lohan mug shot.

Clearly pissed, she sat down at our table in a huff.

"Do you guys kill zebras," she blurted. "Zebrassssss are endangered!"

Before she even uttered the final syllable in this declaration of ignorance, it occurred to me that this girl was most likely impervious to logic. That's the only way she had survived in this incubated state for 20 or so years.

"Hunters are evil!" she roared. "You kill endangered animals for fun!"

Before I could collect my jaw from the floor and dispense this young lady with facts and figures, one of her benevolent friends swooped in and scooped her up from the table.

"Sorry, guys," he offered. "She does this all the time. She's really into 'hunter shaming.'"

(Picture this young man actually making the air quotes around "hunter shaming.")

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I was left speechless as the group moved away toward a downstairs bar. It was clear, I thought, that alcohol had fueled this girl's misguided rage, as no sane young woman would ever approach two strange men at a bar and go straight for verbal fisticuffs almost as if it was option No. 1.

Those kind of antics are normally reserved for the safe haven of the Internet. Which, coincidentally, is where the term "hunter shaming" first made an appearance.

Target: Kendall Jones

Kendall Jones, a 19-year-old Texas cheerleader, actually vaguely looks like the sober, responsible version of the young girl that approached us in the bar that night. Which is filled with all sorts of irony, as it is Jones that has been the most recent target of hunter shaming on a national scale.

After returning from an African safari, Kendall shared her pride on social media along with photos of a leopard, lion, elephant, and rhino (which was darted for veterinary reasons, not killed).

"I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in Zimbabwe and can't wait until the day I get to come back," Jones posted. "Zimbabwe has some of the most beautiful scenery of anywhere I have ever been and Victoria Falls is truly a wonder of the world."

The public knew little of the Cleburne native at that juncture, and we still really only know what she has told us through social media.

She began hunting at age nine with her father on a trip to Zimbabwe, and was immediately engaged with the sport. From there, Jones lived every hunter's dream. She took home plains game trophies and most of the Big Five.

"Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to take a leopard on this trip, so I returned 2 weeks later for another 14-day safari," Jones wrote on Facebook. "This time I got my leopard, and also took down a hippo to get 6 of the Dangerous 7 at the age of 14!"

Soon, the antis discovered her posts and things erupted.

We've seen this all before: A change.org petition has nearly 150,000 signatures as of today hoping to ban Jones from Africa. Facebook is flooded with pages created specifically to hate on Jones. One called "Kill Kendall Jones" had about 400 likes.

The reaction was swift from Facebook. They removed Kendall's images under their standards and practices policy. What was the reason?

"We remove reported content that promotes poaching of endangered species, the sale of animals for organized fight or content that includes extreme acts of animal abuse," officials said.

National TV outlets soon began debating the situation, of course, without presenting the whole story. The waters became ever-so muddy as the death threats rolled in for Kendall.

This is a carbon copy of the Melissa Bachman scandal of recent vintage. Bachman, a famed television host and outdoor personality, was shamed by antis after a photo of her following a South African lion hunt was posted on Facebook.

Jones, a sophomore majoring in marketing and sports therapy at Texas Tech University, is a much younger target, but that's really the only difference. She was participating in legal, CITES sanctioned hunts that bring an influx of money and attention to the local economy.

The facts have remained the same through all of the recent hunter shaming scandals: If managed correctly, hunting is a solution for Africa, not the problem.

If you haven't already, please take a look at "Saving Lions by Killing Them," a piece written by Alexander N. Songorwa, the director of wildlife for the Tanzanian Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism.

If you're curious about the plight of the rhino and how hunting plays into population regrowth, read the IUCN 11-page document entitled "Guiding Principles on Trophy Hunting as a Tool for Creating Conservation Incentives."

These articles dole out the facts. Hunting creates value, value leads to conservation, and conservation leads to the propagation of wild game populations. Bottom line.

But this is no longer about presenting only facts or dissecting Jones's situation blow by blow; that's been done. This is about identifying a rather horrifying trend in our culture and working together to fight back.

The science of conservation and the effect of hunting on Africa's wildlife and the economy is pretty much set in stone. The only variation has been the level of ignorance and anger pointed in its direction.

Defining the Attacks

As hunters let's be clear: This isn't the first time or the last time that some outside-of-the-stereotype hunter will face this kind of harassment. In fact, this is only going to get worse. The anti-hunting faction, especially the zealots, has been forever emboldened by the success they've had on social media. Almost as if Pavlov and his dog had called it, these people have been trained by the world to believe that death threats will be publicly tolerated by most, and hatred met with more hatred equals attention…and that attention brings results.

Victims are not chosen at random. They're soft targets and, more importantly, they're "easy" for the public to hate. Why only photos of Caucasian women with the dead African game? The non-hunting public sees a dead lion and thinks "Simba." They see Kendall Jones and they think "brainwashed by evil hunters." Most commonly, they think, "Why?"

It seems that in this world of hyper-public relations sensitivity that excessive negative PR always adds up to the desired outcome for the dissenters, even if that negative attention is from a small group, if the target is doing nothing wrong/illegal, or if the criticism is in most ways unwarranted. Hunter shaming exists in this vacuum…and it works.

The Facebook page "Kill Kendall Jones" was allowed to stay public for over a week after the site had removed photos of her hunts in Africa. There is no need to review the hypocrisy here. It's obvious.

Look a little deeper and you'll find that hunter shaming is rooted in its ability to distract the media and those it influences from the real problem: the lack of factual information in this debate.

By the time hunters come rushing in with figures and conservation data, it's already too late. Nobody cares. The uproar is the focus. Memes with cartoon lions flood the Internet, "news" reporters on national TV incorrectly label animals endangered or just have the species dead wrong. Craig Boddington doles out facts on Fox News and the article gets a fraction of the attention (literally one-tenth of the shares) of a non-factual, smear job on Buzzfeed.

It was too late for Craig and the facts; the lowest common denominator had already taken hold, and those non-hunters that were so invested initially had lost interest after that first Facebook outburst.

Bachman, Jones, and their peers are only the tip of the iceberg in what is now a legitimate trend. The question is this: Will we continue to be reactionary in the face of hunter shaming?

I think it's time we stand up on a daily basis and answer the question posed by our detractors: "Why?"

In fact, as I'm writing this, another young woman is embroiled in hunter shaming. A 17-year-old Belgian girl plucked from obscurity at the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil, landed a lucrative modeling contract after her beauty went viral. Now she's going viral for another, more negative reason she's also a hunter.

"Hunting is not a matter of life or death," she wrote on her Facebook page. "It's much more important than that."