“All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.”— William Blake, Proverbs of Hell
“To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”— Cecil Rhodes, Founder-settler of Rhodesia (today’s Zimababwe)
“In early July, I was in Zimbabwe on a bow hunting trip for big game. I hired several professional guides and they secured all proper permits. To my knowledge, everything about this trip was legal and properly handled and conducted.” — Dr. Walter James Palmer, official statement after killing the lion Cecil
There ought to be a limit even to craven cowardice. But apparently not, if the ghastly murder of a Zimbabwean lion by an American cosmetic dentist, Walter James Palmer, last month is any indication.
Civilisation touched a new low in its long global record of clandestine and open savagery. Once again, imperial gluttony carved a handsome carcass, earning the chance to pretend to itself and the world that it had secured more firmly its fortress of courage. Yet again, cowardice concealed itself behind the lucrative mask of bravery. Once more, the civilised were summarily savaged.
The farce that civilisation has made of courage continues to mortally stalk the earth and its creatures, practising a set of habits that go back centuries. Routinely, it mistakes bravado for bravery, and bravery for courage itself. Courage is the capacity to bear suffering and transcend it spiritually. Bravery denies the possibility itself, and almost inevitably must descend into vainglory and bravado for that reason. Hubris can’t but bring nemesis in the end.
Children around the world are schooled in a ‘Darwinian’ wisdom, as per which the maxim that most accurately describes the ways of nature via natural selection is “the survival of the fittest”. This, despite everyday proof to the contrary.
Had the fittest survived Native Americans would still be living in harmony with nature in the Americas. If the fittest had survived, Rajputs or Mughals would have thrown the British out of India well before the revolt of 1857 — local legend has it that they were willing to do man-to-man combat with the Europeans in the 19th century, while the latter were taking aim at them through the crosshairs of a modern rifle, attracting the view among the former that they were too cowardly to come physically close to their enemy. If the fittest had survived, Africa, Asia, Australia, the Americas, and perhaps even Europe, might have been teeming with (not so) wild animals still!
If the fittest had survived, industrialised, consumerised humanity would not have been tossing today between the seething scylla of vanishing water and energy on the one hand and the cruel charybdis of climate change.
Cecil’s murder has attracted global attention through social media networks in part because a mascot of popular pride from an iconic, charismatic species was killed by bow and arrows to please the fancy of an American deep-pocket. But several hundreds of lions are killed for “sport” in Africa every year.
The habit is an old imperial one. The Washington Post reported the other day that American President Teddy Roosevelt trapped or killed 11,000 animals on a 1909 Safari in Africa. (These would have included not only big cats like tigers, leopards and lions but also elephants, giraffes and deer.) Even writers of great repute, such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, were trophy-hunters. Bloodlust is what all modernity rests on so seemingly invisibly.
When I visited South Africa a couple of years ago I discovered, to lasting horror, the phenomenon of “canned lions”, whereby the animal is reared in captivity for vanity-hunting by excessively affluent trophy-seekers from Europe and North America.
It is important to grasp that there is no hearty Jim Corbett gamely tackling a Himalayan man-eating leopard in this whole enterprise. No risk or pluck is involved on the part of the tourist hunter from the West in today’s domesticated jungles of Southern Africa. Eager government authorities and drooling local safari operators rig rules and conspire to set up the show in such a happily acquiescent way that the “hunter” is put out of peril from the start. There is no skin in this game whatsoever. There is only lots of greed and cowardice for anyone to notice who still has eyes in his heart.
Why was the lion that Palmer murdered so special as to attract such regional and global attention and why was this creature, so obviously the object of popular pride, called ‘Cecil’? Here some recapitulation of imperial history is necessary, especially for young readers.
When our generation was growing up there was no Zimbabwe. I am almost sure that the land that became Zimbabwe after 1980 had a cricket team in those days too. It would have been playing for ‘Rhodesia’, named after the imperial adventurer Cecil Rhodes, who helped conquer and annex much of Southern Africa to the British Empire (yes, the same Rhodes after whom is named the scholarship so coveted by our Indian university students to this day). Salisbury — named after a powerful British Earl — was the Capital of Rhodesia.
Rhodes was one of the business pioneers of diamond mining in Southern Africa. In Kimberly, South Africa he founded the world’s first and (still) largest diamond company De Beers. Today, this firm controls more than a third of world diamond mining, processing, production and trade. It is responsible for severe ecological damage from South Africa to Canada. It does not prevent its ads from appearing in every glossy, glamour magazine on the planet.
Typical of Rhodes dreams was the redoubtable ambition to draw a “red line” on the African map from the Cape of Good Hope (in South Africa) all the way to Cairo on the Northeastern edge of the giant continent, signifying the long railway route. On geo-political maps, British dominions were denoted in red or pink, as against French-ruled regions in green or blue and, if I remember my school atlas right, the Spanish in orange and the Portugese in yellow.
The British imperial establishment of the day felt the best way to “unify the possessions, facilitate governance, enable the military to move quickly to hot spots or conduct war, help settlement, and foster trade” would be to build the Cape to Cairo Railway. This ambitious enterprise did not get too far since the rival imperial powers in the region, France and Portugal, had their own contrary designs. Besides, the Boer War happened and Rhodes, poor of health throughout his life, died of a heart attack at age 49.
One night last month, Walter Palmer killed Cecil the lion. In Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe he and his team spotted the lion and lured him outside the park. Palmer reportedly struck him with a bow and arrow but the animal did not die. Their sadism stalked and hunted him over almost two whole days. Finally, Palmer used his rifle to put a fatal bullet into him. All this set him back by $50,000. Authorities reported that the lion was skinned and beheaded outside the park.
Who is Walter James Palmer and what does he do to be able to afford the money and hold the values which allow him to slaughter everything from big game species like lions and leopards to bear, rhinos and elks? Since a big part of the reason for animal-hunting is boasting through pictures on the Internet, pictures of his multiple kills have flooded cyberspace.
Palmer is a dentist who specialises in cosmetic dentistry and has a successful clinic in Minnesota called Bluff River Dental. Palmer has mastered the art of “designing smiles” suited to a specific face or bone structure, informs his official website. His clinic specialises in “smile makeovers”. Looking at his beaming images on the net makes one wonder if he has been rendered the same services in the past.
There is something utterly peculiar in human herd belief. It pertains to the question of power and its confusion with cleverness, even intelligence. So readily do so many (including especially the ‘educated’) believe that power is intelligence itself, that ‘winning’, and killing suggests a superiority of intellect. If this was so, then in certain situations ants would be superior to elephants, as would be microbes to humans. Other absurd examples can be imagined.
There is much too much planetary ecological evidence now to suggest that no other species has a poorer estimate of its intelligence or character today than us humans.
Often humanity’s abysmal moral intelligence takes the form of retribution, as though it were justice itself. There is a global hunt for Palmer now. The state of what is called ‘civilisation’ today is such that many thousands across the planet are baying for Palmer’s blood, as though one more murder would put an end to the routine ecological violence of modern civilisation.
Others are proposing yet other strange remedies to the Palmer disease of killing animals. At least 100,000 people have signed a petition to get Palmer extradited from the U.S. But have such people spared a thought for the country to which Palmer could be extradited? One should not want to let men like him loose even in enemy nations. Perhaps he is best left in Minnesota itself. Perhaps a just punishment might be to take away his hunting license. And follow suit with thousands of other such big game hunters in Europe and North America. For murder or execution is not hunting and hunting ought not to be acceptable as a sport in an ecologically imperilled age. Absurdities like “sustainable hunting” have no place in informed rational discourse today. Predatory companies from the billion dollar African hunting industry justify the killing of wild animals on grounds that it is helping the cause of conservation. Irony was never more ironical. The only thing being conserved in such enterprises is the violent bloodlust of modern man.
The approach the air carriers of trophy-hunters might be led to take under consumer pressure is somewhat more humane. A group of airlines including Air France, KLM, Iberia, IAG Cargo, Singapore Airlines, Qantas, and Delta Airlines signalled last week they would ban the transport of trophy-hunting kills. That would be a small start towards making the planet a bit safer for species under threat from organised human predation.
In our world, cowardice always comes well-armed. And just when it thinks it has won, in reality it has lost. Cecil Rhodes’ remark about the unconquerability of the stars applies as much to the planet where it was uttered.
Moreover, the way we treat animals tell us a lot about who we are, who we have been, and who we are becoming. In this season of executions, why not reflect on the meaning of the madness that hunting for sport involves? Primitive humanity was perhaps not so craven and cowardly.
A Native American friend I had in the United States when I studied there shared a story with me years back. Before his mother died, she gave him two tips for survival in a culture which had swallowed up their ancestors. First, “beware of the White Man, especially when he brings you gifts”, she said. Secondly, and this is what one might say to the likes of Palmer, “before the White Man commits a crime he makes a law which allows him to commit the crime.”
It is time for the season to change.
Aseem Shrivastava is a Delhi-based writer and ecological economist. He is the author, with Ashish Kothari, of Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India
