Mike Jines, Top Gen Energy partner and a wealthy businessman from Georgia, receives major backlash and even death threats after photo of him posing with two baby elephants he had killed appears online.
Jines killed two young elephants last year in October when he was on a hunting trip in Africa together with Max Delezenne, a professional hunter.
They proudly pose on the photo with the dead elephant bodies and guns on their shoulders while smiling.
Mike Jines Get Condemned by Society
When the horrible photo of the dead animals and the hunters posing alongside were uploaded on Facebook, Jines’s business started to suffer.
When asked about why he did it, he said that the animals were killed in a specific safari area according to US and Zimbabwe hunting laws. In fact, he even stated that the two elephants were shot in self-defense and both of them were mature, not young.
However, his online hunting profile says that he’s been hunting through Africa and has killed several species of the Big Seven, with the exception of the rhino. Shockingly, it also says his passion is hunting elephants on a classic tracking hunt with a double rifle.
One Twitter user wrote that ‘There’s evil and then there’s #mikejines one can only hope the universe and all that is just punish you for killing those elephants.’
Another one was shocked and wrote ‘He’s seriously blaming the poor baby elephant- claims he HAD TO KILL him and then poses SMILING for photos with its warm dead body. Can you imagine EVER doing business with Top Gen Energy? Disgusting. Massive liability.’
Hunter’s Perspective on Killing Elephants
Jines gave his side of the story and shared it on a forum.
You can read it in full below:
“The hunt started with a bang . . . literally. Less than thirty minutes into the first morning of the first day we experienced a double elephant cow charge. This was obviously a first for me but it turns out it was a first for Buzz as well. We saw a group of cows from the road and decided to follow them to see if a tuskless was in the group. We caught them quickly and identified a tuskless. We positioned ourselves to get a good look at the tuskless and concluded that since it was just Day 1 we would pass. An instant later she came in an all out charge. Buzz and I both fired two shots a piece and she went down. Then from behind us a large one-tusked cow charged at full speed. We each fired one shot and she crashed to the ground with her hind legs out behind her, indicating the speed and determination of her charge. The two cows were less than forty feet apart with Buzz and I in the middle. Fortunately we had positioned ourselves in some open ground so we had good visibility when the charges came. Certainly a little more excitement than we had bargained for on Day 1.”
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