Ted Nugent enjoys killing things. He enjoys killing things so much that when he’s not touring or recording, he offers hunting safaris in the US, Canada and Africa. He enjoys killing things so much that he sells specially branded Ted Nugent hunting arrows on his website, which boasts “Ted Nugent does not compromise.”
He certainly hasn’t compromised in the case of Cecil the Lion, and the worldwide revulsion at Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer, who paid $50,000 to track and kill the Zimbabwean lion, after luring him out of a national park.
In response to a question on his Facebook page, the Hollywood Reporter notes, Nugent said: “The whole story is a lie. It was a wild lion from a ‘park’ where hunting is legal & ESSENTIAL beyond the park borders. All animals reproduce every year & would run out of room/food to live w/o hunting. I will write a full piece on this joke asap. God are people stupid.”
Nugent has long been a vigorous defender of both gun ownership and hunting. He has previously told National Geographic that gun crime is caused not by the presence of guns, but by “recidivism and a failed justice system that continues to let evil, violent, hateful people out of their cages even after they’ve murdered policemen. The media has intentionally misrepresented the utility of firearms and they don’t show the millions of instances where the good people in downtown neighbourhoods have actually saved innocent lives and protected themselves because they have a firearm”.
In the same 2003 interview, he insisted that those who kill animals with guns and bows are the true conservationists, because “we put value on wild ground”. Hunting’s poor image was, as with gun control, down to the media. “The major networks and so many major publications in the world only expose the most callous and ugly examples of poaching and accidents in our sport. For every Bubba that poaches an elk in a national park, there’s tens of millions of families conducting themselves in a safe, legal, ethical manner connecting with that natural tooth, fang and claw culture. I’m convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the hunting community is always on the frontline of environmental monitoring, therefore [has] an environmental awareness that will determine where pollution is striking, where habitat is being lost, where abuse of our natural resources is taking place.”
In 2012, Nugent was fined $10,000, banned from hunting with US Forest Service lands for a year and ordered to record a public service announcement after pleading guilty to transporting an illegally killed black bear in Alaska. He admitted shooting and killing a bear with a bow and arrow after previously wounding another bear. In Alaska, hunters are allowed to take one bear per season, and a wounded bear counts as that one bear. Nugent had been shooting the bears for his television programme, Spirit of the Wild.
