You Go Daddy!

It’s one thing to be a rich jerk and go on elephant safaris every year to reaffirm your masculinity.

It’s quite another thing to post a video of it on your website — even tweet about it — and try to squeeze some profit out of it for your ultra-rich company, all the while maintaining you slaughtered the elephant to help poor, starving African villagers.

That’s what Bob Parsons, CEO of Go Daddy, did in March while on safari in Zimbabwe. Not content to just quietly go about killing mostly defenseless elephants with his big guns and hordes of back-up personnel, Parsons apparently believed that by posting the video he could elicit some sympathy from viewers who would see his action as he did – the brave white man helping poor Africans stop an animal that was destroying their crops and threatening them with starvation.

Just so you know: Go Daddy is America’s biggest web-hosting company with a reported annual revenue of $600 million. Go Daddy Super Bowl commercials – which feature scantily-clad women in a variety of suggestive situations – have become an annual attraction for alcohol-fueled football fans.

And Parsons has never shied away from the controversy his racy commercials sometimes inspire. While the elephant video has created a bit of a firestorm of negative reaction from animal lovers and others, Parsons has remained unapologetic and even proud of what he did.

The video shows the allegedly starving villagers cutting into the dead elephant in a frenzy of hacking and slicing, as if they were too hungry to wait for the animal to be calmly harvested and its meat distributed. And several were shown wearing Go Daddy hats!

Oh, thank you bwana!

Reminds me of the old Beatles song, “Bungalow Bill.” “Hey, Bungalow Bill, what did you kill, Bungalow Bill?”

As if the villagers couldn’t have taken down the offending beast themselves, but were lucky to have Mr. Safari Man come along and handle the problem for them.

What a guy!

Of course, the first organization to express its disgust with Parsons was PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA spokeswoman Ashley Gonzalez was quoted in an ABC News story saying the organization had cut its ties to Go Daddy and encouraged others to do the same.

“He’s obviously not feeling remorseful, but if his customer base speaks up, maybe he’ll listen to that message,” she said. “It’s just horrible for him to post a video of him shooting this animal.”

A Go Daddy spokeswoman told ABC News the PETA criticism had not hurt the company’s business, nor had a wave of actions by Parsons’ web-hosting rivals encouraging customers to transfer their accounts with a portion of their fees going to save-the-elephant causes.

Of course, nobody has to watch the elephant-killing video. And unfortunately, elephant-killing goes on all the time, quietly eating away at an ancient and noble species pushed to the edge of survival by never-ending human expansion.

But having a rich jerk like Parsons boldly posting his kill video and trying to profit from animal slaughter in the name of saving lives of poor starving Africans seems to be obnoxiousness personified.

But that’s just my opinion.

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