Posing with a dead peacock, the unrepentant huntress whose trail of slaughter left animal lovers utterly appalled
POSING with the supremely beautiful peacock, she could almost be caressing a pet. In fact, the glamorous blonde has just killed the bird during a hunting expedition in New Zealand.
In other pictures, American trophy hunter Larysa Switlyk is seen holding up the bodies of her prey to show off how glorious they were before she shot them dead.
Rarely have a handful of holiday snaps caused such furious uproar as those the self-proclaimed ‘hardcore huntress’ posted online after a recent two-week Scottish hunting trip to Argyll and the Inner Hebridean island of Islay.
The lurid photos of Switlyk, clad in camouflage gear, smiling next to the four stags, two goats and a sheep that she shot with a hunting rifle fitted with a telescopic sight have led to angry questions in the Scottish parliament and meltdown among animal lovers.
She has become the latest devotee of the largely American ‘sport’ of trophy hunting to cause international outrage – and has single-handedly managed to prompt the Scottish government to review the law around animal culling. Yesterday it emerged that hunters pay to kill wild goats at £720 (€810) per head on Scottish islands, and that 20 of the animals were killed on the island of Rum last month alone.
Toby Fichtner-Irvine, who runs Gallanach Lodge on the nearby island of Muck, is legally allowed to run goat hunts on Rum. He said the goat population needed to be culled because of the ‘fragile habitat’ on Rum, which is a national nature reserve. ‘They are no different to deer,’ he said. ‘They have no predators and they would cause massive ecological damage in a very fragile habitat if they were not culled.’
But Mr Fichtner-Irvine said it was ‘disgraceful’ for a member of Ms Switlyk’s party to have killed a sheep on Islay. He added: ‘I think the furore over what happened is because the Americans have a particular way of doing things. The pictures are in poor taste.’
CERTAINLY, pictures of Ms Switlyk taken from her social media postings show clearly the 33-year-old from Florida has no compunction about casting her net widely across the animal kingdom in a life largely spent crossing the globe looking for new species to hunt. As with her unpleasantly breezy remarks about her Scottish kills – ‘Such a fun hunt!!’ she wrote of killing a wild billy goat on Islay – it is her brash, gloating presentation and excited description of her trophies that sticks in the craw.
Meanwhile, her example has once again shone a deeply unflattering spotlight on the trophyhunting world, three years after another American hunter, Walter Palmer, shot dead Cecil, the prize lion of a Zimbabwe game park.
Unlike Palmer, a dentist from Minnesota, Switlyk makes her living from hunting – and a very comfortable one, too. She has a hunting reality TV show called Larysa Unleashed, and was recently a contestant in fishing programme Top Hooker.
She also has her own ranges of jewellery and clothing, the latter including leggings with a picture of an AR-15 assault rifle down the sides (she is an enthusiastic supporter of the US’s pro-gun National Rifle Association). Switlyk is also a partner in a travel firm that organises international hunting trips, sometimes with her as a guide. All these interests she happily cross-promotes to her 77,000 followers on Instagram, posting pictures and videos of her latest kills alongside plugs for the guns and equipment she is using.
They inevitably make uncomfortable viewing for non-hunters. In one video she uses a bow and arrow to shoot a black bear that she lures into a trap.
She fires the weapon from a safe vantage point up a tree. The bear winces in pain before staggering off. With a big grin, she then turns to the camera, clenches her fist and says: ‘Awesome.’
After that, she follows the bear’s blood trail before posing with the dead animal, gushing: ‘Unreal, look at this guy.’ The occasional bear aside, for a woman who describes herself as a ‘big game specialist’, she sets a low bar when it comes to the size and ferocity of most of her quarry. The photos taken during the recent trip to New Zealand reveal she killed the peacock (no longer a protected species there) and a cute-looking possum that she shot out of a tree at night. Her trophy snaps exploit the trick of photographing the animal up close with the gloating hunter farther away, to make the animal look bigger than it is.
AFTER shooting an Arctic hare in Greenland, she admits her hunting companion and boyfriend, Jason, upstaged her by coming back with a bigger hare. But she forgave him, saying that ‘there’s nothing sexier than someone bringing home the meat’.
In another shot from the same trip, she strokes the muzzle of a huge dead musk ox. ‘I feel like the real-life “Beauty And The Beast”,’ gushes Switlyk. Disturbingly, she likes to pose many of her kills as if the dead animal is kissing her.
Other recent jaunts have taken her hunting antelope in New Mexico, Cape buffalo in South Africa, Iberian mouflon sheep in Spain, and wild pigs and alligators in Florida. In one photo taken in Florida, she cuddles a piglet close to her face while popping a rasher of bacon into her mouth. She once posted a shot of her squatting over the body of a dead sika deer, pointing meaningfully to the sky. ‘Who else prayers [sic] and thanks God after every hunt?’ she wrote in the caption.
Switlyk has been hunting before in the UK, going to England earlier this year with a TV crew to stalk Chinese water deer. She later posted a photo of her clutching one of the small creatures while a female companion held its bloody heart to the camera.
Meanwhile, trophy hunting’s blonde pin-up keeps her hotblooded male fans happy by posing regularly with other pneumatic young women hunters, including one busty enthusiast, Diane, who prefers to stalk animals while wearing hot pants.
‘Nothing like sharing your passion for the outdoors with other females,’ says Switlyk as she poses with two other women hunters behind an ornately horned Marco Polo sheep they shot in Kyrgyzstan, central Asia.
A former accountant, she says she fell in love with hunting on a guided fallow deer stalk in New Zealand. ‘There was no turning back. I found my true passion in life,’ she says. But the disgust that has greeted her latest hunt in Scotland has incensed everyone, from politicians to tennis champion Andy Murray’s mother.
‘Disgraceful. It’s in Scotland. On a beautiful island. Stop this,’ said Judy Murray. Animal rights activist Ricky Gervais has commented in rather less printable language.
On social media last week, Switlyk was unrepentant, posting a picture of a seaplane that was taking her off to the bush for her ‘next hunting adventure’.
She will be offline for a fortnight, she said. ‘Hopefully that will give enough time for all the ignorant people out there sending me death threats to get educated on hunting and conservation.’
For Switlyk, the hunter who has finally become the hunted, such a harmonious resolution seems most unlikely.