For most citizens of the United Kingdom, Ricky Clark is the owner of a rat extermination company made famous by a BBC programme. For anti-hunting activists Ricky Clark is also “one of the most prolific serial killers still on the loose”. Specifically, he would have killed a hundred African wild animals, bringing their bodies home to display them as trophies.
They came to this conclusion after conducting an undercover investigation which is also based on what Clark himself told them in some interviews.
Clark’s hobby is completely legal, but maybe not for much longer. The British Parliament on Friday 25 November begins discussing a bill that would ban the importation of skins, heads and carcasses of killed animals.
According to campaigners to ban trophy hunting, Clark went on more than twenty safaris in eleven African states and may have killed more than a hundred animals.
These certainly include lions, hippos and two leopards, a species that could be at risk of extinction. It was the deratizer himself who told the details to an activist who interviewed him incognito.
“I killed the first leopard from a few meters away in self-defense, I was hunting another animal and it came on me”. He was in Namibia; the second would have killed him some time later during a safari in Zambia. Clark proudly stated that he also killed buffalo, hyena and antelope.
The derailleur has not only hunted in Africa but in half the world: Canada, Kyrgyzstan, Spain, France, Finland, Czech Republic, Hungary. At home he has a ‘trophy room’ full of stuffed animals – they are the ones he killed himself.
Clark has become famous, not only in the UK, thanks to a program showing his rat extermination operations. With fame has also come a certain social ascent: according to him, he is now part of an association that can go hunting in the grounds of Sandringham House, the royal family’s country residence.
Certainly he is now, in spite of himself, one of the faces of the anti-hunting campaign in the UK, which is filling the capital with advertising posters with photos of British trophy hunters.
