Baboon

In his regular column for the Sunday Times, AA Gill writes the following about an incident on Safari with a Baboon:

Just a little one. I can handle it; I’ll be a recreational primate killer. [...] So there was this big bloke leaning against a rock, picking his fingernails, a hairy geezer sitting in the sun with his shirt off. I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways. I’m told they can be tricky to shoot: they run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.

He goes on and finishes his piece with the qualification, "I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone". Now, it takes something quite special in print to make me laugh and dribble my morning cup of tea over my keyboard, but this was just the ticket. I gather there's a controversy brewing about his open heartlessness, but who cares? In a way, he's like a modern Raskolnikov in his furious attempt to reconcile his emotions for an anthropomorphised baboon. Brilliant.