US Congressman Boasts About Killing and Eating Lion

A US Tea Party congressman has boasted of killing and eating a lion while on a hunting trip to Africa.

Speaking to the National Review, Georgia congressman Paul Broun said that he had decorated his Capitol Hill office with the stuffed and mounted big cat and advocated making full use of quarry.

"'If I kill it, I'm gonna eat it," he said.

"The lion wasn't particularly tasty, it was kind of chewy, but I ate it."

Broun, who is a medical doctor, previously told the newspaper Roll Call that the kill came in Zimbabwe in 2010.

"After eating this animal, the natives called me Boss Shumba, which means Boss Lion," he said.

"They'd never seen a guy come and actually eat a lion."

A stuffed warthog and bear also stand in his office, but although he confessed he had eaten parts of the warthog with a French style sauce, he did not say whether he had tasted the grizzly.

Broun, a renowned red-meat conservative, in more senses than one, has expressed hard-line views on topics ranging from evolution to government spending since being elected in 2007.

In 2012, in a speech at the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman's Banquet,Broun stated, "All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the Pit of Hell ... lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a saviour."

He went on to claim that "as a scientist", he had access to data that showed the Earth to be no older than 9,000 years and that it was created in six days.

Geological evidence suggests that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

Broun is also known for his fiscal conservatism, and introduced a balanced-budget amendment to the House of Representatives this week.

He has compared president Barack Obama to Hitler and Karl Marx, and says that he intends to run for the senate in 2014.