'Shooting an Elephant' (1936) by George Orwell

'Shooting an Elephant' is an essay by British writer George Orwell, first published in the literary magazine New Writing in late 1936 and broadcast by the BBC Home Service on 12 October 1948.

The essay describes the experience of the English narrator, possibly Orwell himself, called upon to shoot an aggressive elephant while working as a police officer in Burma. Because the locals expect him to do the job, he does so against his better judgment, his anguish increased by the elephant's slow and painful death. The story is regarded as a metaphor for colonialism as a whole, and for Orwell's view that, 'when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys'.

Orwell spent some of his life in Burma in a position akin to that of the narrator, but the degree to which his account is autobiographical is disputed, with no conclusive evidence to prove it to be fact or fiction.

In a 2022 interview, Orwell's son Richard Blair said he thinks, 'Shooting an Elephant, is one of the two best essays of his father, together with, 'A Hanging'.