Rise of the trophy wives

29 June 2016 - 09:24 By © The Daily Telegraph

Friday is the first anniversary of Cecil the Lion's death. His killing in Zimbabwe by Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer sparked worldwide outrage.Palmer received death threats, protesters at his office said he should "rot in hell" and the killing was condemned by everyone from Ricky Gervais to Mia Farrow.But Cecil's death has done nothing to put the lid on hunting; and women especially seem to get a kick out of killing wild animals and then posing with their trophies. The number of female hunters in the US surged by 25% between 2006 and 2011.The walls of Olivia Opre's home are full of impala heads and wildebeest horns: "memorable art" the Montana hunting consultant has collected in her two decades as a big game hunter."Animals can die in a lot of ways, and I think being killed by a hunter is the most humane one," Opre, 39, said. It's a stance she's been trying - unsuccessfully - to communicate to her legions of detractors.Opre receives waves of "vicious" messages, sometimes up to 1000 a day, and has had a $50000 (about R700000) bounty placed on her head after one critic posted her home address online."The same people who call me a 'Bambi killer' think it's fine to wear leather, put lipstick on and take penicillin, all of which involve the death of an animal."Anti-hunters draw the conclusion that I walk up to an animal I've shot, smile that it's dead and cut its head off like I'm IS, but there's so much more to it than that."Opre has killed ibex in Mongolia, elk in New Mexico and lions in Benin, hunted 90 species across six continents and brought home more than 150 corporeal keepsakes."I'm attacked because I'm a woman, because I have boobs and hips," said Opre, the mother of four."When you see a woman who kills an animal for sport, it goes against our conceptions of what it is to be a woman," said Bill C Henry, a psychology professor at Denver's Metropolitan State University. ..

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