Jacques and Michi Abney... «Into the Drowning Deep»
RamingoWS13 апреля 2018Jacques and Michi Abney weren`t the best big game hunters in the business. The best would never have considered going on television, allowing their faces to be plastered across vidscreens and billboards the world over. Every year brought another layer of pointless regulations to the hunt, and sometimes having a recognizable face was the difference between successfully bribing a guard to let you into the wildlife preserve and being arrested on sight as a poacher. It was all a bunch of tree-hugging bullshit as far as Jacques was concerned. The bi game would be gone outside of zoos in another twenty years whether he took some of it home or not. The white rhino was proof of that. All the conservation efforts in the world, and for what? So the last wild male could die of old age, surrounded by armed guards he couldn`t understand, as much a captive of mankind as any zoo-bound specimen? At least the animals in the zoos didn`t know what they were missing. No. Better to give the beasts the honor of a good, clean death while the wild was there to witness it. If there was a heaven for lions, Jacques had sent six of them there all by himself, and he fully expected to send another dozen to join them before he got too old to deal with the expense and difficulty of the veldt. It was the least he could do for the big animals that had brought him so much joy and given so much purpose to his life. Michi wasn`t as much of one for lions and the like. She was allergic to cats, and thought safaris were unhygienic. Her passion was for the sea. She came from a whaling family that had hunted whales off the coast of Japan for centuries. It was only during the last hundred years that the foreign do-gooders had insisted the whaling industry cut back, triggering a series of events that led her parents to immigrate to Australia, where she`d grown up surfing, swimming, and shark fishing. Bringing in a great white wasn`t the same as taking down a blue whale, but it was close enough. And now the bastards were trying to restrict that as well, saying the seas were in a delicate phase and needed humanity to act as "stewards" to the animals that remained. They`d met on a fishing expedition, her angling for her first orca, him looking to bring home a leopard seal. It had been love at first sight. Michi was open about and proud of her hunting background, and it hadn`t been long before Jacques was right there with her, trading anonymity for celebrity and the opportunities it carried. He might never sneak into another restricted wildlife park, but he`d been called by quite successful zoos to put down violent or unneeded animals -- and with the amount of security in most remaining animal sanctuaries, a hunt through a good animal habitat could be better than the real thing. It was like using porn in place of traditional foreplay. Sure, it might ruin you for the old way, but since when had mankind ever been focused on the old way? Onward and upward, that was the ticket.
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