Diary: From Jane Fonda to Princess Di, many have been hitched to trigger happy mates

Some are saying former Baywatch star Pam Anderson and musician Kid Rock split up over animal rights and specifically Rock's deer hunting. ("I shoot the deer and she saves it," he reportedly said in an interview.) Nor did it help that Rock's mother wore a fur to the wedding ceremony in what looked like an intentional rebuke to Pam. [1]

Anderson, of course, is a PETA spokesman who recently posed nude in fashion designer friend Stella McCartney's store window as part of an anti-fur campaign and campaigned against Canada's ongoing baby seal slaughter. Currently Anderson and the Rev. Al Sharpton are speaking out against KFC whose supplier's employees were filmed committing atrocities against chickens.

Maybe Kid Rock should have donated his deer to the homeless which invariably gets sportsmen labeled "generous" even if they had no intention of eating their quarry to begin with. (Are sportsmen who dump their deer along the side of the road generous?)

Not that it helped Goldie Hawn's common law husband Kurt Russell whose celebrity hunting expeditions of the early 'nineties with buddy Ted Nugent were scorified by Hollywood despite the mountains of axis deer, mouflon rams, wild boar and feral goat meat that were donated to the poor. (You want us to eat WHAT they probably said.) [2]

Of course Pammie and Goldie are not the only women who find themselves with men who evidently prefer their rifle to their gun, as the joke goes.

"Environmentalist" Ted Turner makes a small fortune inviting put and take hunters like Dick Cheney onto his 20 game farms to blast away penned bison, deer, African antelopes and turkeys. [3] And don't forget his one man crusade to reduce buffalo to just another fast food item at his chain of Ted's Montana Grill restaurants.

Did Jane Fonda cook his game and launder his cammies? I bet not.

And of course there's Madonna whose hunter husband Guy Ritchie was castigated by PETA for shooting a wild boar--"a small vegetarian animal who can only run from your guns," they wrote in a letter-- in Florida in 2001. [4]

Once reputed to be a vegetarian, Madge has taken to blood sports under Ritchie's tutelage and told BBC Radio One in 2001, "I wear leather shoes. I eat fish, I eat chicken and I eat game. I like knowing what I'm eating and knowing the process. You have more respect for things you eat when you go through, or see, the process of killing them.''

Of course hunting's not about the killing says Madonna like countless dewy eyed hunters before her; it's about nature.

"When you're shooting, you are standing in the forest for really long periods of time, so you end up looking at the leaves and the sky and the trees and you have a lot of time to meditate,'' she rhapsodizes. [5]

Unfortunately, Madonna was also reported to be stocking her Ashcombe House with battery raised pheasants from France to be blown away at $20,000 canned hunts she holds on her property--not exactly "natural" hunting. [6]

Do the shooters look up and admire the leaves when a bird is released from its cage to enjoy its two seconds of doomed freedom?

And of course there was Princess Diana.

Di's dislike of the blood sports so central to Royal life--the Queen publicly, dispassionately rung a half dead pheasant's neck in 2000--was no secret. It was no doubt complicated by the fact that her husband's hunting partner was also his love partner, Camilla Parker Bowles, now his wife.

But when Princess Di's son William killed his first stag she finally spoke out and told the Sunday Mirror she was afraid he would turn into ''a remorseless hunter with a blood lust.'' She did not need to add, like his father. [7]

Chances are Pam Anderson will do fine without Kid Rock just as she has without Mötley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, her previous ex.

But with her penchant for musicians, let's hope she doesn't take an interest in Troy Lee Gentry. The country and western singer recently admitted to shooting--and videotaping himself while doing it, what a man--a tame pet bear. [8] An act so callous and insensitive, it makes Kid Rock look like, well, Bono.

[1] bangshowbiz.biz
[2] Daily News of Los Angeles Aug 14, 1989
[3] Washington Times, 20 Jan 2002
[4] San Francisco Chronicle Aug 27, 2001
[5] Spokesman-Review Dec 30, 2001
[6] New York Post Oct 19 2006
[7] San Jose Mercury News Dec 1, 1996
[8] Pioneer Press Nov 28 2006