Killing Cecil

By Rich Lowry

“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 shouldbarely register. What is the fate  of one big cat compared with the civil  wars and humanrights 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. 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 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” (althoughhe won’t be giving it back) was a local  favorite. As if it would be OK towound and hunt down over two days some pitifully unpopular and anonymous lion. 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. 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 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.  Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.