Mark Twain famously said, “Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.”
I keep wondering if Minneapolis dentist Dr. Walter Palmer is blushing or expressing any shame or regret now that people all over the world have expressed loud outrage against his killing of Cecil the lion.
In all fairness, Palmer claims he did not know the lion he killed had been a protected one in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. He did not know, he said, that a hunting guide and landowner had lured Cecil out of the park with bait so Palmer could kill it, shooting it first with an arrow from a crossbow and then, 40 hours later, finding the wounded creature in agony and then killing it, skinning it, cutting off its head and trying to hide its tracking collar. Palmer paid at least $50,000, we are told, for his shameless big-game “adventure.”
Palmer’s credibility is a bit shaky ever since he was caught and pleaded guilty to lying to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for shooting a black bear illegally in Wisconsin 10 years ago.
Just days after Cecil’s death, wildlife officials in Zimbabwe accused another American of killing a lion in an illegal hunt near the same park – Hwange. According to their charges, Jan Seski, a gynecological oncologist in Murrysville, Pa., was the culprit during his Safari spree last April.
The question is not so much did those men kill those lions illegally. The real question ought to be, “Why did they kill lions, period, legal or not?”
One-hundred years ago, there were about 300,000 lions in Africa. Now there are an estimated 30,000. The numbers of other magnificent animals – including elephants and rhinos – are on a critical decline because of poaching and safari-hunting.
What motivates human beings to kill such animals, actually paying sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for their killing privileges? Is there anything more stomach-churning than to see these big-game killers kneeling by their unfortunate victims while beaming ear to ear and saying things like “Ain’t she a beauty?!”
Well, she was a beauty. Now she’s suddenly not a beauty; she’s dead, thanks to you, lion killer.
There are photos on the website of Palmer posing with the animals he killed. One of them is particularly nauseating, the one of him holding up, almost as in a love embrace, a beautiful – but dead – leopard.
I can imagine these adventurers thinking how impressive that lion’s or leopard’s head will be when it’s stuffed and displayed in their dens or how great that skin will look as a rug in front of their fireplaces.
These affluent killers need a new hobby!
We are all familiar with such big-game safari hunting photos, some of them famous ones of giants like Teddy Roosevelt or Ernest Hemingway posing like grinning idiots next to their victims. In those days, such animals were far more abundant in Africa, and thus most of us viewed big-game hunting in much the same as, say, hunting deer in Minnesota.
Times (and animal populations) have changed. Most people, as the worldwide outrage after Cecil’s killing demonstrates, find big-game hunting – at least of African animals – completely repugnant. What kind of ego has to be fed by the killing of magnificent creatures? And what lengths they go to kill them! We are told safari-club fees paid by the adventurers actually help protect animals in Africa. Yeah, right – let’s kill animals to protect them.
It won’t do to vent our anger against Palmer and the others. We should reserve our outrage for the safari organizations that make such stupid butchery possible. Big-game hunting of such animals should be illegal, period, just as poaching is – or is supposed to be. My advice is to research safari clubs, write letters, speak out, join animal-rights organizations. Let’s help stop this mindless killing.
