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Bob Parsons, chief exec­u­tive and founder of the Web ser­vices com­pany GoDaddy, got in hot water last Thursday after he posted a video online of him killing an elephant.

I got in hot water last April Fools’ Day after I posted a pic­ture of me killing a deer named Rutherford.

The dif­fer­ence is, Bob Parsons’ dead ele­phant is really dead. My deer is, pre­sum­ably, alive and well, and the pic­ture I posted was a Photoshopped image in an arti­cle I wrote, when I was Editor-in-Chief of The Medium, as an April Fool’s Day joke.

The arti­cle was, I thought, well-written, funny, and, above any­thing else,  an obvi­ous April Fools’ Day prank. The edi­to­r­ial staff loved it. It began like this:

“Last Sunday, cam­pus police found the remains of a deer lying on the Five Minute Walk. The stag, which the Mississauga zoo once tagged as “Rutherford,” was miss­ing chunks of flesh from its flanks. Police believe Rutherford was slaugh­tered for its meat, and that the person(s) respon­si­ble for the mur­der fled the loca­tion to avoid cap­ture when a stu­dent hap­pened upon the scene.

Following a police inves­ti­ga­tion, a res­i­dence stu­dent pro­duced a pic­ture of an adult male wield­ing a san­toku knife as he stalked a deer in the UTM wood­lot. Mary Takeda, a fourth-year Scatology major, said she did not hand the pic­ture to the police because she thought it was a harm­less prank. (…)” (Click here to con­tinue read­ing, and do take a moment to admire the maniac’s photograph.)

As it turns out, the prank wasn’t that obvi­ous a prank, despite the absur­dity of the whole thing. For exam­ple, the wit­ness of the killing was an Scatology Major, and the detective’s name was Constable Ness (of “The Untouchables” movie fame). There was also a Facebook group called “Deer Hunters of UTM,” a Deer Hotline, and a National Deer Foundation. Lastly, the police ques­tioned  a hunter-gatherer UTM stu­dent, Grubhn (get it?) Chefanana, a native of Ladonia.

Oh, and the Biology pro­fes­sor named William Cody? That’s Billy the Kid’s real name.

Still, quite a few peo­ple bought it. A reader told me, weeks later, she’d asked her boyfriend to walk with her every time she left res­i­dence after dark, lest she come across the “maniac.” And a vol­un­teer writer con­fessed to me she’d wept as she read the article.

Other read­ers were less naïve. Someone cir­cled pas­sages of the arti­cle, scrawled “FAIL” in big fat let­ters at the bot­tom of it, crum­pled the news­pa­per, and nailed it to our office door, a ges­ture that I found vaguely threatening.

A few of them seemed to think the arti­cle was in poor taste—except they used harsher words. Posting on the com­ments sec­tion, they wrote the arti­cle was “dis­gust­ing,” “appalling,” and “not funny.”

(Others, how­ever, praised it, call­ing it “funny,” “hilar­i­ous,” and an obvi­ous prank. One reader, iden­ti­fy­ing himself/herself as “K,” informed me that the tech­nique shown in the pic­ture was not the proper way to stalk a deer.)

In the week that fol­lowed, I learned a few things:

1. Some peo­ple seem to think that any­one capa­ble of jok­ing about an animal’s death is auto­mat­i­cally capa­ble of coldly killing one.

2. People tend to accept what they read in a news­pa­per. As the say­ing goes, “Paper will hold any­thing.” To which I’d add, “And many will eat it up.”

3. Some top­ics are guar­an­teed to increase readership/online hits, but their prize is high (angry read­ers, calls to action, threats, or a sim­ple shrug and a goodbye.)

The last point addresses the sus­pi­cion, among some cir­cles, that Bob Parsons posted that video as a mar­ket­ing tech­nique. Whether that was his inten­tion or not, I may never know. But right now, I bet he regrets doing it. Even if it had been a hoax.