The elephant in the webpage

So I'm late to the whole GoDaddy elephant controversy. If there's anyone out there more out of touch than I am, their CEO filmed himself killing an elephant in a herd in Zimbabwe that was trampling the farmers' crops. Bad press has been rampant, and a competitor has apparently raised over $20,000 for Save the Elephants in a gimmick to get people to transfer from GoDaddy to their company.

On the one hand, anything that might lead to GoDaddy going out of business, or at least shutting down their marketing department, is to be applauded. I would very much like to never have to see Danica Patrick pretend like she's going to take off her clothes again. Any feminist cred she might have aimed for by being the first famous female race car driver is more than effaced by the fact that she squanders her "drives with the big boys" capital by cashing in on the male fantasy of seeing her strip and/or engage in "hot girl on girl" action. Other female pioneers in their field somehow managed not to feel the need to capitalize on their sexuality. Sandra Day O'Connor, Sally Ride, and Amelia Earhart were all the "first female" something without engaging in a strip tease.

On the other hand, now that I look into some of the available outrage, it's hard not to get annoyed at the overreaction out there. First, you have to get past the "*GRAPHIC CONTENT!*" warnings on the video, which apparently refers to the fact that they show the elephant skinned so it can be cut up for meat. Seriously, if you've been to the meat aisle in the supermarket, you've seen this. I thought they were going to show a close-up of the elephant in extreme slow motion at the point of impact, spurting blood and brain matter, from the way they hyperventilated over it. Then, you get copy like the prose in this article complaining that the CEO in question has gone back and edited out some of the more stupid aspects, such as his posing with the dead elephant, captions that give him personal credit for the kill, and an AC/DC soundtrack: "Also gone is the incredibly bizarre use of the AC/DC song Hell’s Bells, which used to play over top of footage of the villagers slaughtering the elephant’s corpse."

Really? "Slaughtering the elephant's corpse?" How exactly do you slaughter a corpse? Isn't a corpse already dead? No doubt they wanted the word "butcher," which still sounds like something out of a slasher movie but has the unfortunate side effect of reminding the reader that hungry people in Africa need to eat and that it's infinitely better, once the elephant in question is dead, for it to provide food for people who need it rather than left to rot in the sun or taken back to the US as a trophy.

(I can't really give GoDaddy a pass on the grammar front either, though. The captions in the video, which I assume are the original work of the CEO, are full of incomplete sentences.)

Honestly, I think it all goes back to Dumbo, the false image people who don't have to live with them have of elephants as cute and cuddly. They're always the good guys in Disney movies. If Disney movies are to be believed, the domestic housecat is the most evil animal in the world. Maybe the GoDaddy guy should have gone hunting one of those.