Death of a (celebrity) lion…

It’s an unfair world we live in, it must be said.

From the time I woke up this morning till now, I must have drawn breath around… ooh, too many times to bother counting. And with every breath I took, I must have inhaled countless microscopic water droplets from the air… any of which might have contained an entire ecosystem of infinitesimal living organisms, such as bacteria.

This means I have quite possibly murdered literally millions of living creatures in the past seven or eight hours alone. And this gruesome death-toll does not include the billions of other bacteria currently residing in my stomach and intestinal tract… a sizeable portion of which are inevitably killed every time I ‘do what a man’s gotta do’ on the toilet.

And yet, despite having singlehandedly slaughtered an unquantifiable number of living beings every single day of my life... to date I have not been forced into hiding by an international online lynch-mob. Nobody has called me a ‘murderer’, or posted pictures of all the cute, cuddly little bacteria I so cruelly defecated to death this very morning.

But then, one American dentist shoots one, measly little lion somewhere in Africa… and just look at the global response. I don’t recall such unanimous demands for retribution, even in the case of Osama Bin Laden, who murdered three thousand people.

And that, I suppose, is the thing about lions. Their reputation precedes them. And it is a reputation built on centuries (if not millennia) of attributing to these African mammals all the qualities we would dearly love to be able to call our own… but for very obvious reasons can’t. Courage. Strength. Beauty. Majesty. In a nutshell, all the things that human beings seem to have come to this world for the sole purpose of defecating upon. 

Just think of all the recognisable icons that have evolved over the years, reinforcing our mental image of this animal as an instant symbol of power, grace and dignity. Such as the MGM lion, proudly roaring on the silver screen. The Lion and the Unicorn, immortalised in sculpture all over the former British Empire. Or the TVM advert, informing us in sombre tones that: “I drink Lion Brand Tea. Shouldn’t you…?”

Etc. Etc.

Then there are all the literary allusions: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Cowardly Lion from Wizard of Oz. Or the Nemean lion, slain by Hercules in the days before the invention of Facebook outrage (i.e., when ‘slaying lions’ was considered a perfectly reasonable activity for an unemployed demigod to pursue).

This fascination with lions has even infiltrated the English language. We talk of ‘lionising’ people, when attributing to them the same quasi-mythical status reserved for the genus ‘Felis leo’. It has left claw-marks on the world of sport, too. The UK’s official rugby union, for instance, decided to name its international touring side ‘the British Lions’... even if these ‘Lions’ sometimes get mauled by such harmless creatures as ‘Wallabies’, ‘Springboks’, and even the occasional flightless bird such as the ‘Kiwi’.

This alone illustrates how the myths we create do not always match up to reality… but still, we cling to these myths regardless. The ‘British Lions’ will not rename themselves the ’British Field Mice’, no matter how many times they are devoured by animals much further down the food chain. This because the myth of the lion – ‘The King of the Jungle’, even if you’ll never actually find one there – is simply too alluring to ever let go.

All of which might explain why the killing of one particular specimen named ‘Cecil’ – though I’d bet a box of Lion chocolate bars that he never actually responded to that name – has provoked such spectacular global outrage. Walter Palmer, it seems, slew more than just a random lion on his ill-fated hunting trip to Zimbabwe. He also took aim at, and shot, all our most cherished preconceived notions about this magnificent creature (and therefore, by extension, about ourselves).

This makes him guilty of singlehandedly murdering all that is good, and innocent, and pure, and noble, and majestic in this increasingly ugly world. And by the looks of things, he is paying for this crime to the full.

But let’s stick to the myth for the time being. Do lions deserve the aura of majesty that human imagination has endowed them with? That they are beautiful, graceful and strong, I suppose, goes without saying. But are they also as ‘courageous’ and ‘magnanimous’ as the tsunami of Facebook memes now seem to suggest?

To give an indication of the absurd extent to which this myth has now been taken: the last Facebook post I read urged “forgiveness for Walter Palmer… because that’s what Cecil the Lion would have wanted” (!).

Personally, I was unaware that Cecil was a keen advocate of the ‘do unto others as ye would have others do unto you’ motif… popularised by the same early Christians his kind ate so many of around 2,000 years ago. If so, I somehow doubt he would have survived long enough on the African savannah to be ‘murdered’ by an American dentist in the first place.

We were also told that “Cecil the Lion had never harmed anyone”... unless, of course, you count the poor little antelope he feasted on for breakfast that morning; not to mention the innocent offspring of other lions he might have savagely slaughtered, as part of the natural process by which male lions claim female mates in the wild. (Cecil had cubs of his own, which will now suffer the same fate.)

This latter detail alone should be enough to explode the little bubble of romantic idealism that has overshadowed this entire incident from day one. The life of a lion, in reality, is a far cry from the almost chivalric notions we have imagined for ourselves over the centuries.

And Walter Palmer shot a real lion. He didn’t shoot a symbol of some hopelessly unattainable, subconscious human desire; but a living, breathing member of the big cat family. And he is by no means the only human being to have ever done such a thing… not in Zimbabwe, nor in any other of a dozen African countries where lions are hunted for sport.

This is from an article in Time magazine this week: “[Zimbabwe] is a country where… hunters exported 49 lion trophies in 2013 alone… and where, since Cecil’s death ‘it’s likely that at least a dozen other lions have been shot by trophy hunters’.”

Strangely, there was no corresponding outrage at the killing of so many other lions: even if this was done by the same category of hunter – namely, rich Westerners who view the natural world as their private playground – for the same reason.

And that’s just lions. It turns out that the same Huange National Park that Cecil once called home, was also the site of a massacre of some 300 elephants in 2013: killed by poisoning water-holes (which implies that all sorts of other animals would also have died as a result).

I know it’s become fashionable to ask “where were you” when all this took place… but it’s a relevant question nonetheless. Why no global fuss about the massacre of 300 elephants in one fell swoop? How do we explain the contrast with a global outpouring of grief and fury over the death of a single lion… out of all the hundreds killed over the past decades?

Part of the answer involves the emotive response of people to individual animals such as lions, for all the above cultural reasons. But there is also discrimination of another kind at work here, this between lions and lions. If at least a dozen other specimens have been killed by trophy-hunters since this single incident… why so much fuss specifically about Cecil?

For much the same reason, I suppose, as the fuss that was made when Kim Kardashian graced the cover of the Rolling Stone magazine. Cecil was a celebrity lion. He was known to thousands of people around the world: some of whom had travelled thousands of miles to get a distant glimpse of this iconic, black-maned specimen… the largest living lion in Africa (at least, while he was still living).

And Walter Palmer shot him. A creature loved and admired by so many people around the world, shot dead for the fleeting amusement of a single, selfish individual. As for all the other lions routinely killed each week in Zimbabwe by other, equally selfish individuals… well, they’d never been on the cover of ‘Celebrity African Animal’ magazine, had they? This makes them nonentities. And nobody cares about nonentities, be they lions or any other animal (including people).

There is, however, another reason for the extraordinary global reaction to the death of this one, solitary celebrity lion named ‘Cecil’. It is about the only aspect of this otherwise exaggerated tsunami of outrage that is actually honest and genuine (so of course, it didn’t last very long).

Even if hypocritical and highly selective, the response to Cecil’s death nonetheless indicates a profound shift in cultural attitudes since the days when Hercules could kill and skin ‘the largest lion of his time’… and not only escape criticism, but actually be hailed as a hero for his ‘bravery’.

In today’s world, all that has been thrown into reverse. It is humanity itself that has replaced lions, tigers and ‘Big Bad Wolves’ as the central villains of the piece. It is human activity that is all too often to blame for what we perceive as the great natural injustices of this world: the loss of natural habitat, the exploitation of wildlife for profit, the destruction of entire ecosystems, and the extinction of individual species (such as the Northern Black Rhino, hunted to extinction just last year).

Unfortunately for him, Walter Palmer just happened to embody almost every negative aspect of this revised perception of humanity. Just like the lion he killed, he too has become a symbol of something much greater than the sum of his actions. He has come to symbolise all that we perceive as cruel, selfish and inhumane about the human animal. As such, he must be punished… not just for killing Cecil the Lion, but also for reminding us all of how deeply flawed we are as a species.

Is this fair on Walter Palmer? Erm… no, not really. What he did was certainly despicable, and I myself would find it impossible to defend him on any count… but what he is actually being punished for is another crime altogether; a crime that was not committed by Walter Palmer as an individual, but by humanity as a whole.

But then again: was it ‘fair’ that Cecil the Lion died merely to boost one man’s ego? Is it ‘fair’ that his cubs must also be killed in their turn, as decreed by the pitiless laws of nature? Is it ever ‘fair’, when certain individual injustices are held up for public opprobrium, while other much greater injustices go unpunished and even unnoticed?

Nope. As I said before… it really is an unfair world we live in.