Life & Wisdom Quote by Nigel Dennis

There is a particular British kind of confession that sounds like modesty but lands like a knife: if the whole enterprise is already compromised, why pretend it isnt? Nigel Dennis takes aim at the safari-era moral theater of "big game photography" by pointing out the unromantic mechanical fact under the romance. You are not stalking lions on foot like Hemingway cosplay; youre perched in a vehicle, insulated from consequence, nature reduced to a drive-through spectacle. Once the photographer admits that advantage, the ethical line between shooting with a camera and shooting with a rifle starts to look less like a chasm and more like a change of equipment.

The genius of "so then I feel I might as well take the lot" is how it performs slippery logic as character revelation. It is not an argument for hunting so much as a satire of rationalization: the mind turning convenience into permission. Dennis is teasing a certain colonial posture that wants both purity and dominance, the thrill of conquest without the mess. Photography, in this view, becomes trophy culture with better PR. The animals are still being "taken" - as images, as proof, as bragging rights - and the Land Rover is the real weapon, delivering the tourist safely to the kill-shot composition.

Written in the long shadow of imperial travel writing, the line punctures the idea that modernity civilizes desire. It simply gives desire a quieter trigger.