Trophy hunter seen creeping up on sleeping lion and shooting it is identified as Illinois man

Trophy hunter seen creeping up on sleeping lion and shooting it is identified as Illinois man

According to The Daily Mail—A newly resurfaced video shows a trophy hunter shooting a sleeping lion in Zimbabwe, sending it to a painful death—and now provoking outrage on the internet, the hunter is 64-year-old Manhattan, Illinois’ Guy Gorney.

The graphic footage shows Gorney firing three rounds into the sleeping lion, which then wakes up writhing with pain. First of all, the video opens with Gorney, dressed in safari garb, taking aim.

You can hear the voice of someone who presumably the gamekeeper whispers instructions as Gorney steadies himself. The camera then zooms in on the lion, who sleeps peacefully in an open plain on the ground.

Suddenly, the first shot is fired and the lion arches his body immediately, opening his mouth wide with painful sounds. The lion is visibly confused by the sudden attack before the second and third shots ring out and the lion collapses back on the ground.

“Okay, okay, don’t do any more,” the gamekeeper tells Gorney after the third round. The gamekeeper congratulates Gorney and shakes his hand enthusiastically.

“A very nice lion,” the gamekeeper continues, patting Gorney on the back. As the hunting group gets closer to the lion’s dead body, the camera zooms closer to capture the beast’s lifeless face and the gamekeeper can be heard calling it “an exceptional lion.”

The gruesome video was shared by a UK-based animal advocacy organization on Twitter using the handle @Protect_Wldflife.

“This ‘hunter’ sneaked up on a SLEEPING #Lion and killed it!,” the Twitter caption for the video read. “How brave, how sporting – HOW CUNTISH!!!”

Public reaction online was swift with many Twitter responses calling for the hunter, who had not been identified at the time, to be revealed. As things tend to develop on the internet, the identity of the hunter was eventually revealed to be Gorney.

It might not come as a surprise but this isn’t the first time Gorney has been publicly targeted for his hunting habits.

In 2015, Chicago radio station WBBM interviewed the shooter after a photo on Gorney’s Facebook showed him straddling the back of a dead lion. Judging from the outfit Gorney is wearing in the old photo, it was presumably taken on the same hunting trip documented in the now-viral video.

Aside from these documented exploits, Gorney has successfully hunted down what he calls the “Big Five”: lion, elephant, rhino, buffalo, and leopard. At the time of the interview, Gorney said he had killed an estimated 70 animals.

Gorney’s Facebook shows him posing with a variety of wild animals that he’s killed. One photo, in particular, shows Gorney smiling as he poses in a squatting position right next to a hippopotamus he had shot, with its wound visible on the side of its carcass.

The dead hippopotamus’ body had obviously been posed with its mouth held agape by a thick stick to show off its large teeth.

Other photos show Gorney posing with dead grizzly bears, rhinos, elephants, and moose, among other animals that he killed.

“When I killed that buffalo that had hurt somebody, the people that had benefited from the death of that animal cheered. Clapped,” Gorney said in the radio interview. “The ‘why’ is just the – I call it the adventure of it. Same reason Teddy Roosevelt did it.” He also stated that he considered shooting a lion instead of a zebra, one of the big cat’s usual prey, part of keeping the balance in nature.

“I love zebra, so shooting a lion probably saves 70 zebra a year, give or take,” Gorney said.

In the interview, Gorney continued on to say that he abides by the law when he hunts and doesn’t agree with poachers or people who threaten other people, likely a reference to the individual who doxxed his address and phone number online after the 2015 photo came out.

Nevertheless, lion populations have come under increasing threat from poachers and trophy hunters like Gorney.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, there are only an estimated 20,000 lions left in the wild, which has the lions now classified as a vulnerable species.