95-year-old Antonio "Tony" Sánchez-Ariño doesn't regret killing more than 1,000 elephants throughout his lifetime. The big game hunter killed 1,317 elephants, 340 lions, 167 leopards, 127 black rhinos, and 2,093 African buffalo.
"To clarify things from the outset, I want to emphasize that I have been a hunter since I was born. I am very proud of it, and I don't have to apologize to anyone for it," he wrote in the book Hunting Under the Southern Cross and the North Star. He claims to have killed more than any other big game hunter in history.
However, he said that when he started hunting that elephants were everywhere. He also claims to have completed all of his hunts legally with proper licenses. However, he admitted to legal loopholes such as using friends' hunting permits. "I never killed a poor animal for fun; there was always a good reason for doing it, keeping in mind that animals in their world and their environment, with their families, are as happy as we are in ours, and we shouldn't kill for the sake of killing," he wrote.
Big Game Hunter Killed A Lot Of Elephants
The hunter also claims to have protected people from the animals.
"I have often been asked — usually by well-meaning but ignorant people— why we hunted elephants, such good and friendly 'little animals'," Sánchez-Ariño writes. "I fear that these people watched Dumbo too many times, all that sweetness and sentimentality... because the reality is quite different. In their natural habitat, elephants don't let children stroke their trunks — not even close. They were a nightmare for the people who had to live alongside them."
The hunter compared hunting elephants to bullfighting.
He wrote, "In bullfighting, when the matador charges with the sword, it's called 'the moment of truth.' Facing elephants head-on was similar. [...] The moment in which one had to bring down 'the team captain' with a precise shot, without the slightest excuse or pretext [...]. Once the leader was brought down, the other elephants crowded around the fallen one, as if waiting to be told what to do, a precise moment that had to be seized to bring down the rest of the members [...]. The downfall of the rest was to stick to the fallen leader."
However, the hunter doesn't blame the decline of the animal species on hunting. In his opinion, it's the rise of industrialism in Africa.
"The great enemy of elephants is the fact that we're entering the 21st century. Africa has awakened from the slumber it was in for centuries, and its population is growing at breakneck speed, creating a consumer society that increasingly demands new land for its natural expansion," he wrote. "The habitat of elephants is under threat from all sides, because logically, no human being is going to sacrifice himself for any animal in this world, where the fight for every inch of land is constant."
