Melissa Bachman's dead lion photo: So much for education by Twitter

You don’t need to be a card-carrying Peta member to find the photograph grotesque

Melissa Bachman poses with a dead male lion in South Africa

We know that cat videos rule the internet, but one online feline has attracted a different sort of attention. American TV presenter Melissa Bachman provoked an outcry by tweeting a trophy-hunting picture.

You don’t need to be a card-carrying Peta member to find the photograph in which she is seen kneeling behind the corpse of a lion tasteless and grotesque. The 12,000 – and counting – South Africans who signed a petition calling for Bachman to be banned from visiting their country obviously did. Meanwhile, a similar photo of a dead elephant and a grinning family of hunters has gone viral, with posters calling for the people in the photo to be identified and punished.

As with the inappropriate Halloween costumes (Boston bombing victim, bloody Asiana airline pilots and white students blacking, up to name but a few) which provoked outrage this year, the real shock isn’t so much what these people did, but that they were so oblivious to how others might react that they posted pictures online with the intention of showing off. Isn’t social media supposed to educate by exposing us to world-views different from our own? It doesn’t always work that way, apparently.

Would tipsy on telly really be so wrong?

This week our thoughts are with X Factor judge Nicole Scherzinger as she battles her personal demons: namely, the fact that she appears to be drunk on camera when actually she isn’t.

Scherzinger has strongly denied the persistent rumour that she has a few drinks before filming and I’m minded to believe her, but I also can’t help but wonder why it would be such a big deal if she was tipsy?

X Factor is a Saturday night show with a party atmosphere and Nicole’s “slur-mazing” wordplay is easily the most entertaining aspect of the current series. I’d drink to that.