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I shot a baboon in Africa, last Wednesday, just after lunch. Shot it dead. Those of you of a nervous disposition should look away now. This article contains graphic scenes and may upset the sensitive. But it doesn’t contain flash photography, so while it may make you froth at the mouth, it won’t make you bite through your tongue, jerk about on the floor and wet yourself.

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• The Kitchin

I was in Africa wearing a Robert Redford Out of Africa hat. The sort of hat that just makes you ache to kill stuff. I have a theory about hats: they really do maketh the man.

Temperament and inclination to actions and professions inhabit a hat. Guardsmen are obvious examples, as are policemen, clowns and builders. Put on a yellow hard hat and you are possessed. Magically your buttocks crawl out of your jeans and you have an incontestable desire to say: “Two shoogs and an ’obnob, love.”

We could do a lot of liberal social engineering by rearranging titfers. If riot police had to wear mortarboards, there would be much less gratuitous truncheoning. Prison warders should wear chefs’ hats, bishops should have big Ascot hats, lads in hoodies should be made to wear those food-safety hygiene hairnets after dark. If the Jews and the Arabs wore each other’s yarmulkes and tea towels, it probably wouldn’t lead to peace in the Middle East, but it would be bloody funny.

So I’m in Africa, in a hat, with dark intentions and a truck full of guns and other blokes in hats. Josh the hunter said: “Why don’t we shoot a baboon?” All nonchalant, looking out of the window at the amazing Tanzanian acacia scrub that drifts into the Serengeti plain. What about a baboon?

And here’s the thing. If you tool around the beautiful and unruly bits of Africa long enough in the company of gangs of men in purposeful hats, sooner or later you’re going to do baboon. You think you’re not, you think you’re the exception, you’re going to just say no to baboon, but pretty soon it’s the monkey on your back. I should have worn my Stella McCartney hat.

So, I said, why not? Just a little one. I can handle it; I’ll be a recreational primate killer. Now, baboons aren’t stupid. Well, no stupider than Piers Morgan. They know that bipedal hominids in hats, hanging around in trucks with guns, are up to no good. They see you, they sod off, in great gambolling gangs, babies riding their mums like little jockeys. And then they stand around on rocks and bark like alsatians and jump up and down, mooning with their big meaty arses, like a lot of Millwall supporters down West Ham. Ha! But neither baboons nor Piers Morgan are smart enough to have invented telescopic sights. So there was this big bloke leaning against a rock, picking his fingernails, a hairy geezer sitting in the sun with his shirt off. I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways. I’m told they can be tricky to shoot: they run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. We paced the ground. The air was filled with a furious keening of his tribe. Two hundred and fifty yards. Not a bad shot.

I know perfectly well there is absolutely no excuse for this. There is no mitigation. Baboon isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard. The feeble argument of culling and control is much the same as for foxes: a veil for naughty fun. They might, at some unspecified theoretical future date, eat birds’ eggs, young impalas and dik-diks — they are opportunist omnivores. You wouldn’t trust one to baby-sit. But then everything has to eat. I noticed that, when it was alive, I thought about the baboon as a thing. Now he’s dead, I’m posthumously anthropomorphising him, and that was one of the reasons I killed. I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger. You see it in all those films: guns and bodies, barely a close-up of reflection or doubt. What does it really feel like to shoot someone, or someone’s close relative? But, as so often happens in life, when you stare into the magnifying glass at a profundity, it’s the prosaic and pitiful that’s reflected back. He looked much smaller dead; the elegant and nimble black fingers were terribly human, with their opposable thumbs, just a couple of stops down the Metropolitan line of evolution. I examined his fingernails with the same surprise and awe I did when my children were born. And then you look in his mouth, and there’s the difference. One of the most ferocious gobs in all the wild, incisors the size of a leopard’s. “Some local people say it’s ill luck to kill a baboon,” Josh mentioned. Yeah, right. And which one of us looks like he’s having a bad hair day?

Any connection between the wildlife in this column and this week’s restaurateur is purely coincidental. John Torode is that bloke off the telly. The other one in MasterChef. The one who might have been a 1960s photographer or runner-up in a Lovejoy lookalike competition. He and the bald one are the Flanagan and Allen of cold dinners, the Mike and Bernie Winters of yumming. Torode boldly does the toughest job in broadcasting: professional extempore eating. Watching other people chew is bilious. Showing off your expressive and judgmental eating skills is far harder than blowing away a monkey.

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