Old News: Infamous Lion Hunter Slipped And Fell 100 Feet To His Death During Hunt... In 2016!

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk
Old News: Infamous Lion Hunter Slipped And Fell 100 Feet To His Death During Hunt... In 2016!

Did veterinarian/hunter Luciano Ponzetto slip and fall 100 feet during a hunt and did he die from his injuries? Yes, he did... in 2016. But the "news" of his death recently went viral again after an activist site reposted it without giving any indication it happened over two years ago.

The story went viral again via an article published on December 13, 2018 by Disclose.tv titled "Infamous Lion Hunter Slipped And Fell 100 Feet To His Death During Hunt" (archived here) which opened:

An infamous Italian veterinarian and hunter, who found fame last year due to photos of him posing with a lion he had killed recently, slipped on ice and fell 100 feet to his death while hunting.

Luciano Ponzetto, 55, was hunting birds in the hills near Turin, when he slipped and fell and into a ravine, killing him instantly.

The Italian Police were called by mountain rescue services, who had been alerted to the incident by somebody who was out hunting with him. His body was found and recovered by helicopter and then taken to the local hospital. They deduced that he had slipped and fell when he was out hunting, his death was immediate with no chance of survival.

Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail and they would not have seen the news was almost two years old:

Infamous Lion Hunter Slipped And Fell 100 Feet To His Death During Hunt

An infamous Italian veterinarian and hunter, who found fame last year due to photos of him posing with a lion he had killed recently, slipped on ice and fell 100 feet to his death while hunting. Luciano Ponzetto, 55, was hunting birds in the hills near Turin, when he slipped and fell and into a...

Disclose.tv describes itself on the "about" page as follows:

On Disclose.tv like-minded users discuss, submit, and share topics and videos that are

  • ignored
  • denied
  • suppressed
  • marginalized
  • inadequately covered

by the mainstream media, governmental institutions, and other information gatekeepers.

Had they actually read "mainstream media" they would have discovered the story was already covered by The Sun in 2016:

Italian vet who posed next to dead lion he killed dies while shooting wild birds

A big game hunter who sparked worldwide fury when he posed next to a lion he had killed has died after falling 100ft down a ravine while shooting birds. Vet Luciano Ponzetto, 55, received death threats and hate mail after he posted the snaps of him with the lion on social media last year.

Seeing as The Sun was the newspaper with the biggest circulation in the U.K. as of 2017 we are unsure why anyone would think this story was "ignored", "denied", "suppressed", "marginalized" or "inadequately covered".

Statistic: Circulation of newspapers in the United Kingdom (UK) as of June 2018 (in 1,000 copies) | Statista
Find more statistics at Statista

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:


  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

About us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a U.S. based fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


Follow us on social media

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2019/01/fake-news-infamous-lion-hunter-slipped-and-fell-100-feet-to-his-death-during-hunt.html
leadstories.com
CC-MAIN-2023-06
92510
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:Y5LARVGFOGXMLG3NYWHVXSB6LTZQTABJ
<urn:uuid:8df2034f-f12e-4c4f-b6fa-46d735091056>
2023-01-31T04:06:39Z
104.22.28.177
text/html
sha1:GHJI3HP4INDPZQHJLDDD2XXLFG7ZJD6H
<urn:uuid:33517a65-4537-42d8-a151-38dd1499c3c4>
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2019/01/fake-news-infamous-lion-hunter-slipped-and-fell-100-feet-to-his-death-during-hunt.html
response
<urn:uuid:2cd2250e-e50d-4f02-be2e-2bb724ccb8da>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-06
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January/February 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-204
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/