This week’s UK Twitter villain: AA Gill, who killed a baboon for the hell of it

The furor over Jan Moir has died down on Twitter, but a new evil British columnist has stepped into the Twitter hate limelight.

This time it’s UK restaurant critic AA Gill, who you may remember for describing the Welsh in general as “loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls” or his description of his countrymen as “beady eyed” and “beefy-bottomed.” Gill posted a gleeful piece this weekend in the Sunday Times about killing a baboon essentially just to watch it die. (Mind you, regarding the Johnny Cash reference that Cash has stated he wrote the lyric because he couldn’t think of anything more evil than killing someone just to watch them die, and he wanted to indicate that the song’s subject was indeed an evil man.) Gill is currently getting a lot of Twitter rage from our gun-shy friends across the pond who take issue with his gratuitous murder of a cute and clever animal.

Gill talks about how baboons try to, you know- not die when they see jerks like him swanning about on holiday with guns:

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. We paced the ground. The air was filled with a furious keening of his tribe. Two hundred and fifty yards. Not a bad shot.

As the dead baboon’s baboon friends and family grieved him, Gill remorselessly assesses the impetus behind killing the little monkey:

I know perfectly well there is absolutely no excuse for this. There is no mitigation. Baboon isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard. The feeble argument of culling and control is much the same as for foxes: a veil for naughty fun. They might, at some unspecified theoretical future date, eat birds’ eggs, young impalas and dik-diks — they are opportunist omnivores. You wouldn’t trust one to baby-sit.

The baboon hunt, which goes on for a whole page, is merely a lead-in to a review of a restaurant. Tweeters have been tweeting their disgust increasingly, and here are a few recent ones:

AA Gill…. what a massive wanker.

If I shoot AA Gill will I know what it’s like to kill a baboon?

I just shot AA Gill to see what it would feel like to kill Nick Griffin.

I hereby copyright a “Pay-per-view event of a monkey shooting AA Gill.”

And of course, it wouldn’t be internet rage without referencing the past few big internet scandals:

I was going to get angry about AA Gill until I read (an) excellent Jan Moir piece about how baboons make questionable lifestyle choices.

The controversial column has predictably spawned a new hashtag: #baboonboy.