By Rich Lowry
Friday, July 31, 2015
“Until the
lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the
hunter.”
— African
proverb
On the ledger of global outrages, the killing of Cecil
the lion outside of a Zimbabwe national park should barely register.
What is the fate of one big cat compared with the civil
wars and human-rights abuses that fill the headlines — or should fill the
headlines — every day? Even in Zimbabwe alone, where grotesque misgovernance is
the rule, the death of one lion should hardly be a blip.
And yet the animal’s shooting by a Minnesota dentist,
Walter Palmer, has evoked a fierce reaction. Some of it is hysterical and
insipid. Palmer shouldn’t be personally ruined, let alone brought up on
war-crimes charges, as some seem to suggest. The outpouring over this
particular cat is, in part, based on the childish anthropomorphism of his
having a name, Cecil, after Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist and founder
of Rhodesia, subsequently Zimbabwe.
Nonetheless, at the core of the outrage is a natural and
healthy revulsion at the wanton destruction of an animal of great majesty.
Perhaps the greatest majesty.
Lions have been the subject of wonder and awe since the
beginning of time, a symbol of power and nobility. They feature in cave
paintings and in royal iconography. The Book of Proverbs refers to the “lion which
is strongest among beasts, and turneth not away for any.” C. S. Lewis made the
lion the messianic figure in his classic story The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe. The stateliness of the New York City Public Library is made
unmistakable by its two famous marble lions presiding over Fifth Avenue.
The regal self-possession of the lion stands in stark
contrast to the tawdriness of Walter Palmer’s hunt. There was the
money-grubbing — he reportedly paid about $50,000 for the privilege of killing
one of the beasts. There was the unseemly baiting of the animal — allegedly
with an animal carcass tied to a car to lure it out of the sanctuary of Hwange
National Park. There was the cruel incompetence of his method — supposedly
wounding it with a bow, then tracking the creature for another 40 hours before
completing the kill with a gun. And there was the casual butchery after the
fact — beheading the cat and leaving its carcass to vultures and other
scavengers.
When it emerged that the lion he had killed was Cecil, a
popular fixture long tracked by researchers, Palmer issued a statement saying
he had no idea that the lion he “took” (although he won’t be giving it back)
was a local favorite. As if it would be okay to wound and hunt down over two
days some pitifully unpopular and anonymous lion, for nothing more than the
sport and glory of it, such as they are.
Trophy hunters like Palmer have a passion for killing
polar bears and the like. There is no accounting for taste, but surely there
are other engrossing hobbies that don’t involve shooting the planet’s most
stunning creatures. How about stamp collecting? If that’s not thrilling enough,
there’s always mountain climbing, BASE jumping, or tightrope walking.
Anti-poaching laws, which might have been broken in this
case, should be as tightly enforced as possible, and the act of killing a
glorious beast for a photo with his carcass and a stuffed head on the wall as a
conversation piece back home should be considered the shameful waste that it
is.
None of this is to say that lions in particular should be
sentimentalized. They are man-eaters whose social life is Hobbesian in the
extreme. They also are a wonder of nature whose numbers are dwindling. We can
disagree about the exact parameters of our obligations to the animal kingdom,
but surely going out of our way to slay a creature like Cecil the lion should
be out of bounds.
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