Cambridge-educated lawyer Abigail Day named as top trophy hunter ‘who killed dozens of animals including lion & rhino’
A CAMBRIDGE educated lawyer has been named as a top big game hunter who has who killed dozens of animals including lions and rhinos. Abigail Day has won more than 20 awards from Safari Club International, a US hunting organisation whose London chapter she founded in 2006. The corporate lawyer is one of only two […]
A CAMBRIDGE educated lawyer has been named as a top big game hunter who has who killed dozens of animals including lions and rhinos.
Abigail Day has won more than 20 awards from Safari Club International, a US hunting organisation whose London chapter she founded in 2006.
The corporate lawyer is one of only two living British hunters known to have the club’s “African Big 5” award for shooting a lion, elephant, leopard, rhino, and cape buffalo, the Telegraph reports.
Her involvement in big game hunting is world will be revealed in a new book Trophy Leaks by Eduardo Goncalves, the founder of the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting.
The book also exposes Asif Wattoo, a Thames Water manager, who has hunted zebras and also posed with giraffe carcasses on trips to France, Pakistan and South Africa, the Star reports.
Ms Day – who graduated with a law degree in 1987 – has hunted in at least 36 countries across six continents.
In 2008 was the recipient of SCI’s Diana award for the world’s top female trophy hunter and now co-chairs the committee for the award, named after the Roman goddess
In she wrote to the Telegraph 2005 championing the “vital role” hunting plays for conservation.
“Your reporter loses no opportunity to turn your readers against trophy-hunters, and mentions conservation only in passing, although he is forced to acknowledge the vital role trophy-hunting plays,” she wrote.
“If your article succeeds in demonising trophy-hunters, the future of the African lion will be less secure.”
Her west London home reportedly has busts of two Oryx on walls of her front room, their horns nearly touching the ceiling.
Two warthog heads protruded out from the wall on either side of a mirror, and on the mantelpiece is a stuffed big cat, possibly a leopard.
She declined to comment on the contents of the book.
“There is no other Briton so deeply in meshed in the global industry,” Mr Goncalves said.
“To see her list of awards was extraordinary.”
Mr Wattoo goes on regular hunting trips with South African firm Umlilo Safaris – who offer ‘canned’ lion hunts and shooting trips where you can hunt rhino, elephant, leopard, hippo and antelope.
Canned hunting is the killing of captive-bred wild animals in small enclosures and is most commonly associated with the trophy-hunting of lions.
Writing on Facebook about one of his hunts with the company he said: “The ram was quartering away so hit him a bit back but the bullet came out of the neck so you can image how much was he quartering away… he only ran about 10m and dropped.”
Most read in News
In another post talks about his hunt for the “perfect” head of a waterbuck, a type of African antelope.
“I could’ve shot him at 80m but I wanted my first animal to be a full symmetrical/represented trophy,” he said.
The Sun Online has approached him for comment.