We love a good fight, don’t we? Enter Walter J. Palmer, a tanned dentist from Minnesota, with a bow and arrow. Along comes Cecil the lion, the alpha male of his pride, minding his own business of being the best-known and most beloved lion in Zimbabwe if not in Africa, as well as the subject of an Oxford University study. Then Cecil is shot with a bow and arrow, taking 40 hours to die, all because Palmer thought killing a magnificent animal was sporty.
I read the story of Cecil’s killing and my education and intellect deserted me for a minute. I felt only disgust and rage, somewhat inarticulately. I feel no calmness about big-game hunters. I am not persuaded by their justifications, which can be easily punctured with buckshot. Trophy hunting contributes to conservation, they say: when the Dallas Safari Club auctioned the right to kill an endangered Namibian black rhino, it said the $350,000 winning bounty — they called it a “bid” — went towards conservation efforts in Namibia. There are only 5,000 black rhinos left.
The population of African lions has been reduced by 50 per cent in the last three decades, says the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and there are now only 32,000. Elephants, leopards, polar bears and giraffes are all hunted for “sport” too. Shooting an endangered species and calling it sustainable is like waving a fan and thinking you’re helping to stop global warming.
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In April, after Ricky Gervais tweeted a picture of the blonde, pretty Rebecca Francis lying next to a dead giraffe she had just shot, the Internet went ape. Arguably, it went more ape than it would have if she hadn’t been female, and you can find plenty of earnest essays about how women have the right to be big-game hunters without getting an online hounding. I don’t care what gender she was. I care that afterwards she declared that she had done a good thing. The giraffe was elderly, she wrote, and was going to die soon. By shooting him, she had honoured his life by making his body useful to locals: his tail could make jewellery and his bones could make “other things”. “I’m no game biologist,” she wrote, but “there is no question that hunters contribute the most to the welfare of wildlife.”
Follow this argument further and you reach the reasoning that poaching and trafficking do more harm than big-game hunting. True. Wildlife trafficking is worth $7-10billion, and is the fifth most profitable illegal market worldwide. Yet in many countries where poaching is rampant, policing is patchy and punishment often nothing more than a fine. Yes, poaching is more damaging than trophy hunting. Murder is worse than grievous bodily harm, technically, but I’m comfortable strongly objecting to both.
But violently objecting to hunters can be almost as bad as hunting. Most public displays of big-game hunting attract fury and sometimes death threats, as Palmer has been subjected to since his identity was revealed. The fact that African countries such as Namibia and Zimbabwe sell licences to shoot their own big game gets less attention.
Palmer is said to be “quite upset,” but only because he got the wrong lion. He blamed his guides for this, rather than his own bizarre and repellent desire to augment his own self-worth (somewhat damaged, now, by a campaign to shut down his dental practice) by killing another creature. Francis was compelled to release a statement saying that she “couldn’t understand how people who claim to be so loving and caring for animals can turn around and threaten to murder and rape my children".
Let’s not turn Palmer and Francis into trophies too, repugnant though their actions are. I don’t want to understand them or empathise. I’d rather not attempt to comprehend the inexplicable act that is the murder of animals for fun. But trophy hunting is about something bigger than that: an assumption that all animals are at our service, and ignoring the fact that we are just clever animals too.
Here is a product of my superior animal brain: a plan. If you’re going to pay $50,000 towards conservation efforts by shooting a lion, then give the money and don’t shoot. Preserving life, by killing fewer animals — now that would be worth a trophy.
— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015