"Those who make the wounds..."
The hunter who baited, shot, skinned and beheaded a beloved, majestic lion known as "Cecil" during a Zimbabwe safari is an American dentist from Minnesota. (New York Daily News)
People are justifiably outraged, now that the Big Media--at last!--has covered the crime of one of the many degenerates who roam the world murdering animals for egotistical pleasure.
Walter Palmer (left, with another victim) --the now notorious Minnesota dentist, and a bow hunter, to boot, like that other scoundrel, Ted Nugent--may have killed a lion designated as a special animal, the "Lassie" of the wildlife park, an emblem of Zimbabwe, but in truth the crime of "sport hunting" is really indefensible. Whether at home or in Africa, the taking of animal lives for kicks, indulged by stupid, revoltingly selfish and morally bankrupt people--a bunch that includes European princes, Arab sheiks, American millionaires, other lesser celebrities (like Donald Trump's sons), and even the local plumber--is generically unjustifiable. Certainly and doubly so at a time when the human species has triggered a global devastation of nature that scientists properly qualify as a threat to the planet's life-sustaining systems, and the largest anthropogenic die-off of animal species in history. (And don't get me going about animal factories).
In a world falling apart, the sociopathic selfishness of Walter Palmer, and the corrupting insolence of money, deprives us all of the comforting company of a magnificent creature...
Cecil deserves to be mourned, and not easily forgotten, but the issue is far larger than that. No lion, no elephant, no animal should be killed for "sport," for adornment, for "traditional" medicine, or any other stupid or frivolous human purpose. This should be established fact in any society that claims membership in the club of civilised nations. And let me make something perfectly clear: Many voices are complaining that Cecil was "illegally killed," which adds to the trouble in which Palmer now finds himself, but the fact remains that Cecil was assassinated within a cultural framework in which such killings are facilitated and encouraged not only by an entire industry of hunting guides and outriggers, arms manufacturers and hunting lobbies, but by national governments themselves, in the name of "conservation." The argument is that such expensive licenses to kill prize animals allow these poor countries to maintain wider conservation efforts. I always thought this argument logically bankrupt at its core, the idea that in order to save some victims we must allow the killers to indulge their base tendencies. If you want to help a species, why not just donate the money and not kill? Have any of these lowlifes ever heard of cameras? While on the topic we should also mention that no one points out that the sum total of such revenues, representing all this carnage, just in the case of Africa, is less than the price tag of a few F-16s, a grotesque misallocation of resources that only underscores the profound disease afflicting international society at all levels.
Below, a video roundup of reaction to the news, an encouraging response that proves what we have said countless times, that the squandering of mass media time on idiocies and lies, while real issues go begging, is a crime of a different sort, but nonetheless a crime deserving of serious attention. And that people, properly informed, usually react with decency and compassion.
Where would we be if the world had a responsible, thorough, and properly moral media? Certainly not in the royal mess we inhabit.
--Patrice Greanville