Trophy Hunter Tess Talley spoke with CBS This Morning about the viral photo she took in 2017 posing with a giraffe she had killed.
After posing with the decorative pillows she had made with him, which she said “everybody loves,” Talley explained that “not only was he beautiful and majestic” but he was “delicious.”
“I see it as a hobby. It’s something that I love to do. This hunt was conservation. We are preserving the wildlife. We are managing herds. We are hunters. I’m proud to be a hunter. I’m proud to hunt. And I’m proud of that giraffe. It’s joy. If you don’t love it, you’re not going to continue to do it.”
Talley said that she gains “so much respect” for the animal after killing it. “They are put here for us. We harvest them. We eat them. I am okay with providing for my family and friends.”
Talley said she’d rather kill animals than give a lump sum of cash to a conservation organization. Talley claimed she would not hunt if she knew it would not lead to conservation.
Asked why she flaunted the killing on social media, Talley said trophy photos were “tradition” and blamed social media for making them a bad thing.
CBS News adds: ‘According to Bubye Valley Conservancy manager Blondie Latham, 80% of the reserve’s operational costs are covered by trophy hunting, including their in-house anti-poaching task force. The task force, which was established to protect the reserve’s population of the critically endangered black rhino, costs over $750,000 to run each year. Not all animals at Bubye can be hunted, and the black rhino is off limits. “We currently need more hunting,” Bryan Gurney, the head of the Bubye anti-poaching task force, told CBS News. A former high-ranking officer in the British army, Gurney said that as poaching syndicates are growing stronger, his unit needs more money to keep up its protection of the rhino. There are only around 5,000 black rhino remaining in the world, and Zimbabwe has the fourth highest population.’
