“I was tracking him on foot,” begins hunter Jacine Jadresko in The Women Who Kill Lions (Channel 4, 9pm). “And there is the lion, literally 15 metres from me … staring right at me.” Does she retreat? Lift her phone for a covert selfie? Or just sit and watch Africa’s majestic symbol of power, now a vulnerable species with as few as 30,000 left in the wild. Of course not. She positions her rifle and shoots.
Later in the documentary, which airs one year after Cecil the lion was killed by US dentist Walter Palmer and the world woke up to the reality of trophy hunting, we get to know more about Jacine. She is the daughter of a millionaire Croatian property developer who has killed 29 different species in three years. We encounter her friends, who find it hard to stomach her obsession, her pitbull, and the bullet casings lined up on the mantelpiece full of tiny scrolls commemorating her kills. Her motivation is rapacious and remorseless bloodlust. She just loves killing animals for sport. At one point she goes hunting for feral goat and when she can’t find one switches target to a rare Dalmatian sheep. Next, she wants to “go for” an elephant and a rhino. She is the single mother – tattooed, buff, glamorous – of a 10-year-old boy who is already a dab hand at hunting. “It makes me feel alive,” he tells his mother after he’s shot a robin from their deck. “That’s my boy,” Jacine replies, ruffling his hair.
When she phoned her parents to tell them she wanted to hunt a lion, they said: “Lion hunting is going to be banned in the next 10 years … so go for it.” Using $16,000 of their money, she did. She recalls shooting three rounds into the lion, how the first hit his chest and got him “spinning and biting”, and the second took him down. And the third? She doesn’t say but presumably she was just enjoying herself. It is profoundly distressing stuff.
What is the point of this horribly compulsive programme? Ostensibly to show that more women are taking up trophy hunting, an overwhelmingly male bloodsport, and that they are on the receiving end of the vast majority of the abuse. This is unfair but it’s hardly a surprise: why would misogyny absent itself from hunting? What’s appalling about these people is not their uteruses but their mania for killing animals for sport. And seeking publicity for it. If only Louis Theroux were on hand to wheedle more of the psychological motivation and impact of trophy hunting out of them. Without such probing, The Women Who Kill Lions becomes mere gut-churning spectacle.
Anyway, these women are clearly not in it to upset the gender status quo. Hunting is a thoroughly conservative sport, no matter the sex of the hunter. Jacine and Rebecca Francis – the trophy hunter Ricky Gervais made famous when he tweeted a picture of her lying alongside the neck of a dead giraffe and beaming proudly – are all long hair, painted nails and a penchant for “girlie” guns. This is no joke: the pinkification of firearms is an actual thing. When Francis goes shopping in her native Wyoming before a family hunt, she strokes a “pink 22 for tiny girls” and confesses she recently bought one for her granddaughter.
Nothing here challenges the view that trophy hunting is a hubristic and abhorrent bloodsport and yet another example of rich (invariably white) people taking advantage of poor (invariably non-white) countries. As a thing to do, it remains incomprehensible to me. “We love [animals] more than anyone else on this planet,” insists Francis, a woman so desperate to promote herself as a conservationist trophy hunter (and I can’t come up with a more oxymoronic term than that), I ended up feeling sorry for her. Then, as she prepares to shoot a blacktail deer in Washington State, her real motivation is unwittingly revealed and it’s nothing to do with conservation or bolstering local economies. “Buck fever,” she whispers, shaking uncontrollably. “Once I shoot the animal I’ll continue to shake for quite a while because it’s such an overwhelming feeling … to be able to do that.”
Even more upsetting is the aftermath. The clumsy arrangement of the dead animal for the photo opportunity. The wild and monumental body now floppy and so available. The hunter wild-eyed and ecstatic, patting flanks and murmuring “beautiful”. Noticing the deer is still bleeding from its fatal wound, Francis says: “We’re going to have to cover that up.” Her bow is placed over the wound. She smiles for the camera.
Britain’s Favourite Dogs (ITV, 8pm) was catnip by comparison. In a world where things continue to fall apart and there is still enough outrage left over for the 600 lions killed each year for sport, a list of our top 10 breeds is warm comfort indeed. ITV surveyed 1,000 dog owners across the UK (though who trusts polls any more?) and the results are, at least in this case, as you expect. Lots of spaniels, golden retrievers, Yorkshire terriers and collies running and shaking in slo-mo. There was one surprise: the unfairly maligned Staffordshire bull terrier (and admittedly the breed of my own sweet dog, Daphne) came in at number six. Top dog was, of course, the labrador. No matter how destabilising our times, the love affair between Britain and the loyal lab will never end.
