It's hard to feel sorry for a man with a gun who hunts elephants for sport. But that's one of the many problems with animal rights extremists. In their religious zeal to place the world's beasts on an equal footing with people, they always manage to snatch defeat when an emphatic victory is handed to them. How ironic, really, that attempting to save animals sometimes exposes the worst of human traits.

But irony has been a word bandied about way too often in the past week. It's why I've come to feel such sorrow over the events following the death of Theunis Botha. Amid all the carnage inflicted on the world over the past seven days, you may have missed the news about the passing of this 51-year-old former South African soldier with five children. That's not such a bad thing. It means you also escaped the embarrassing celebrations that accompanied his demise.

Theunis Botha, a well-known big-game hunter from South Africa, had taken high-paying customers on legal excursions for three decades. Credit:Facebook

Botha was a leading big-game hunter who had been taking high-paying tourists on legal hunts for more than three decades. Last Friday, near a small village in western Zimbabwe, his touring party came across a group of elephants that began to charge at them. Botha fired as they attacked. But one elephant managed to get close enough to hoist him with its trunk. That elephant was then shot by another hunter and, as it fell, it took Botha with it, crushing him.

As news began to emerge about the death of such a prominent hunter, animal rights activists around the world began a frenetic victory dance, joyously celebrating Botha's demise at the hands of "his enemy" with a string of abusive postings on social media, some of them plastered across his Facebook site so his wife and children could view them.