Death of a King

One of my favorite places to look for blogging inspiration or maybe just a good laugh is the yahoo news home page.  Luckily for you and I, yahoo news has pulled through once again and served both those purposes.  Today’s breaking story: a giant, red stag is murdered days after its appearance in a British newspaper.

His name was the Emperor of Exmoor.. which I had a hard time refraining from laughing at right off the bat.  People are furious that he was killed but how do you expect a one-of-a-kind red stag called THE EMPEROR OF EXMOOR, NOT to be killed.  I've never been hunting in my life and even I'm jealous I didn't shoot that deer in the face.  The 12 year old king of beasts was gunned down days before mating season was to begin.  "There is a moral and ethical code about this — you don't shoot the best beast before they have had a chance to mate." Peter Donnelly articulated my sentiments perfectly.

He was his own worst enemy: what did he expect growing 9 feet tall? He had every big game enthusiast in the world drooling.  My first thought was how people obsess over animals that are cute, overly sized, or in any way unique and the death of such an animal turns into a murder mystery.  I'm no animal rights activist, but people should realize we kill and harvest domesticated animals in obscene numbers.

In any case, the quotes from the article were funny to me: "With a set of antlers such as this deer had, it was basically going to kill him in the end," said Richard Austin, the photographer whose images appeared in newspapers

"He was his own worst enemy, I suppose," Austin told the BBC. "Growing that big and that huge and that magnificent, he was a definite target."  The deer slipped up when presented with this photo-op.  Carelessness always kills the best of us.

The only thing we can hope is that the Emperor went out like a champ; that some guy looking like Van-Pelt from Jumanji shot him with class and skill; that the Emperor's head and antlers are adorning the living room of his Spanish style villa.  Worst case scenario would probably be like the Emperor being hit with a mortar launched from the back of some guy's pickup truck or gunned down with an uzi or AK.  Whatever way you went out Emperor, just know that you were too beautiful for this world... and too beautiful not to be shot and sent to a taxidermist.