GoDaddy CEO is told where to go for killing elephant
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2011:
Purporting to be practicing elephant conservation by shooting
an elephant in Zimbabwe on March 8, 2011, posting video of the
shooting to a web site a week later, GoDaddy.com web domain
registration baron Bob Parsons did help to raise some funds to help
elephants. NameCheap, a GoDaddy rival, offered to donate $1.00
from the $4.99 price of arranging a web name transfer to Save The
Elephants, of Nairobi, Kenya. The promotion raised $20,433.
“We decided to cease our involvement with GoDaddy,”
announced Michelle Sciuto, cofounder of the web hosting firm
Venovix. Venoxix offered free web domain transfer help in exchange
for recipients donating to the International Elephant Foundation, an
umbrella for zoo-based elephant conservation.
Save The Elephants founder Iain Douglas-Hamilton told Jason
Straiuso of Associated Press that he appreciated the money, but
regretted the circumstances.
The video showed Parsons standing in a trampled sorghum
field, claiming a need to shoot the elephants who did the trampling.
Three elephants are pursued in a night hunt; one is shot. The next
morning people whom Parsons calls “hungry villagers,” some in
GoDaddy hats, butcher the dead elephant.
“You can’t control crop raiding in Africa through foreign
hunters,” said Douglas-Hamilton. “It’s a perk for people who enjoy
killing elephants to justify themselves.”
“I have been to Africa some 70 times,” commented Will
Travers of the Born Free Foundation. “What Parsons says about
elephants-how they are overpopulated in Zimbabwe, how villagers are
defenseless against them, how he is ‘taking care of them very
selectively, so that the farmer’s crops are safe’-is self-serving
nonsense. Born Free USA had been doing business with GoDaddy,”
Travers added. “We took steps to divorce ourselves from Parsons and
his company.”
Agreed Friends of Animals president Priscilla Feral, “The
rogue animal is Parsons. Zimbabwe’s trophy elephant hunts are all
profit-driven, nothing more.”
Said Humane Society of the U.S. president Wayne Pacelle,
“HSUS has about 650 domain names with GoDaddy.com. I have instructed
our staff to find another host for them.”
“If Bob Parsons really wanted to help African villagers,”
offered PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk, “he would use his money to
promote one of the many effective nonlethal methods available to
protect crops.”