Alright, alright – so we had to post a story about this. One page on social media posts pictures of an American woman sitting next to a dead lion that she killed in South Africa, and the whole internet goes nuts.

Michelle Bachman, who is a trophy-game-hunter, may well want to delete her Facebook account. She has been trolled relentlessly after pictures of her and her kill emerged on Facebook. Since then, a Change.org petition, which  has received  over 135,000 signatures, asked the South African government to deny Bachman’s entry into the country.

“I’m a hardcore hunter doing what I love!” Bachman’s Twitter bio reads.

So, obviously, there’s been a huge uproar. Not only about the hunting, but about the misogyny suffered by Bachman at the hands of internet trolls. On that note, the Daily Maverick published an article about the misogynistic comments that appeared under Bachman’s photos. Comments like:

“I would happily blow her head off.”

“I hope she gets breast cancer and dies in pain.”

“I hope that c*nt gets vaginal herpes and dies.”

In particular, the article found the comment that Melissa Bachman is a “gross whore”, who “regresses the gender exponentially” to be particularly distasteful, chiefly because men have been hunting trophy-game like this for years, but have never been accused of making men, as a gender, regress collectively.

It did get one thing wrong, though. The Daily Maverick claims that the hunt was “canned”, which would involve shooting the animal while it is trapped in a small enclosure. This was not the case – Bachman herself stated that she “stalked” the animal, which wouldn’t be possible in a canned hunting scenario.

You can read more about what the WWF considers to be canned hunting, here.

There are many locations in South Africa where people can go to hunt predatory game. Heck, if you click here, you’ll see a site full of pictures of men who have just killed Rhinos, Lions, Elephants – the lot.

And it’s not like these photos haven’t been on Facebook – they have. So why did it take a woman sitting next to a dead lion for people to finally realise that this was happening?

[Source : Mashable]