SICK SAFARI
Fury over Scots hunter who posed proudly beside big game ‘trophy’ animals he had killed in Africa
A SCOTS businessman has sparked outrage after posing for photographs alongside the bodies of animals he shot – including an elephant and a zebra.
Ian Evans, 62, can be seen proudly standing with his high-powered rifle next to each dead ‘trophy’ beast, also including an antelope and a buffalo.
The images were posted on social media by his daughter-in-law Helen Winters.
Yesterday, there was furious reaction to the photographs by animal rights campaigners and members of the public. There were also calls for a boycott of Evans’s businesses, which include outdoor adventure company Galloway Tanks and Activity Centre.
Harry Huyton, director of animal welfare group OneKind, said: ‘It beggars belief anyone can derive any sort of pleasure from killing beautiful creatures and posing with their bodies. Trophy hunting is absolutely abhorrent and this individual should be ashamed of himself, not only for killing these animals but then boasting about it afterwards.’
The images were posted on Facebook by Miss Winters, 36, the estranged wife of Evans’s son Ross.
She said: ‘He has a mountain of these pictures – elephants, giraffes, zebras, antelope and gazelles.’
Miss Winters decided to make the photographs public after a fall-out with Evans over the disappearance of her five pet geese on his farm near Garlieston, Wigtownshire.
She had travelled to Cambridge in February this year after her daughter Faye, 20, suffered a severe brain injury in a horse riding accident – and spent four months away while she recovered.
On her return, she claims she was told Evans had ‘got rid’ of her geese, which she had kept for ten years. Yesterday, she said: ‘At first, Ian said he hadn’t killed the geese. But when I told him I was going to put these pictures on Facebook, he asked me if he could replace them or give me the money they were worth.
‘His reasoning was that I’d abandoned them. But he could have easily texted me to say they needed moving or got in touch with the animal welfare people.’
Yesterday, in an explanation posted on his company website, which he later deleted, Evans, 62, said the photographs were seven years old and that he had killed the elephant during a sanctioned cull in South Africa.
He wrote: ‘There are around 900 elephants in this reserve (expanding at 7 per cent per year, which is unsustainable).
‘All the meat from the cull is sold to fund community projects such as infrastructure, education of local children, community halls and other community buildings. The licence fees go to help the running and maintenance of the reserve. The cull is part of the management of the reserve.
‘These pictures she has shared have been on my Facebook for six years. I find it so galling that she is now trying to turn everything against me. I just love Africa. I am in love with the enormous ecosystem you can study. Yes, I was part of a cull. That’s explained in my statement. It was seven years ago.
‘I went [to Africa] in 2014 but the pictures she is using are from 2009, 2007 and earlier. There was five years between the last one and the one before that.’
Asked if he felt guilty about the killing of elephants, he said: ‘I cried when I shot the elephant because it was the first time I’d ever done it. The whole thing got to me. It was a unique moment that will never happen again.’
Evans conceded he had ‘disposed of’ his daughter-in-law’s pet geese – but said it was only after an attempt to rehome them had failed.
He added: ‘She abandoned those animals. There was no one to look after them. They had the run of the place and the mess they made was incredible.’
Elephant numbers have dropped by 62 per cent over the past decade and they could be mostly extinct by the end of the next decade.
An estimated 100 African elephants are killed each day by poachers seeking ivory, meat and body parts, leaving only 400,000 remaining. As of 2016, there are still more African elephants being killed for ivory than are being born.
‘I cried when I shot the elephant’