Culture

Ricky Gervais Has Been Attacking Another Big Game Hunter On Twitter All Week

"This tofu and rice was old and sad and wanted me to kill it. Now I will eat it."

by Meg Watson  19 April 2015

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When he’s not talking shit about the entire film and television industry for the lols, Ricky Gervais often puts his big mouth to a good cause as an animal rights activist. After speaking out against bullfighting and animal testing, he was named PETA’s person of the year in 2013.

It was around this time he unleashed the following missive at big game hunter Melissa Bachman on Twitter. The corresponding internet outrage led to more than 480,000 people signing a petition which urged the South African government to deny her access to the country.

spot-the-typo-tweet-gervais

Now he’s launched a similar offensive against “Extreme Huntress” Rebecca Francis. Earlier this week, Gervais questioned the morality of the hunter posting a photo of her posing with a giraffe she killed in 2010. After being retweeted by more than 40,000 people, it’s started a whole new controversy.

Francis started receiving an avalanche of not only criticism, but also death threats causing her to shut down her Facebook account which had more than 7,000 followers. She then released the following statement to HuntingLife.com explaining the context of the picture:

“When I was in Africa five years ago I was of the mindset that I would never shoot a giraffe [but] I was approached toward the end of my hunt with a unique circumstance.

They showed me this beautiful old bull giraffe that was wandering all alone. He had been kicked out of the herd by a younger and stronger bull. He was past his breeding years and very close to death. They asked me if I would preserve this giraffe by providing all the locals with food and other means of survival. He was inevitably going to die soon and he could either be wasted or utilised by the local people.

I chose to honour his life by providing others with his uses and I do not regret it for one second. Once he was down there were people waiting to take his meat. They also took his tail to make jewelry, his bones to make other things, and did not waste a single part of him. I am grateful to be a part of something so good.”

The hunting community then caught on to the issue and started standing up to Gervais. It’s a ballsy thing to do really, when you consider the guy’s a professional comedian.

Predictably, he also fought back at Francis’ statement offering a number of posts which made it a little harder to muster sympathy for her cause.

Then, because at this point she had suffered nearly a full week of abuse fuelled by Gervais’ jokes, Francis released another statement to Hunting Life.

“Whether hunting is right or wrong is no longer the issue at hand,” she said. “Ricky Gervais has used his power and influence to specifically target women in the hunting industry and has sparked thousands of people to call for my death, the death of my family and many other women who hunt.”

“This has evolved into an issue about the morality of threatening human lives over disagreeing with someone else’s beliefs. It shocks me that people who claim to be so loving and caring for animals can turn around and threaten to murder and rape my children. Where is the logic in that?”

Meanwhile, Gervais has been retweeting death threats of his own from the hunting community and fending off accusations that he’s sexist.

Today, as everything threatened to finally settle down, he fired up once more:

Then, he called it quits, retiring for the night with the most adorable picture you’ve ever seen.

Shhhh. SHHHHH. Maybe it’s over now. No one bring up Glenn McGrath.