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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   16304 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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In Cecil's case, the lion was "critically wounded" with an arrow and survived another 12 hours before finally being killed. 12 hours of pain and suffering with a critical wound sounds pretty cruel to me.

Hm, perhaps the trophy hunting business could be improved with a sort of minimum caliber/destructiveness requirement on all weapons used for the hunting.

Can't wait for big game hunting with FPV drones.

What kind of lunatic bow hunts a lion? You wouldn't catch me dead with anything short of a .375 H&H, and even then I think I'd be nervous.

There are a surprising number of well heeled maniacs in the world. Bowhunters take fairly large exotics in Texas(and Bison elsewhere in the country) all the time, and I suspect the reason lions and tigers aren't on the list has to do with laws against introducing big cats for exotic game purposes.

I mean I find it highly unlikely it was done intentionally to be cruel. Sometimes animals get injured by an arrow or bullet instead of killed and run away rather than let you out them out of their misery because of that pesky survival instinct.

It's basically just part of the nature of hunting. It's also why most states have restrictions on using too small of a caliber bullet to hunt certain animals. For example I wouldn't trust .22LR to reliably kill anything bigger than a raccoon, even though a lady once killed a grizzly with it (according to some accounts it wasn't even.22LR, it was .22 Short, which is even more impressive).

https://bear-hunting.com/2022/7/grizzly-with-a-22-c

I don't see why intention factors into the cruelty of the fact.

I'm not a hunter, but I'd expect a dentist from Ohio would have an easier time quickly killing a lion with a gun rather than with a bow and arrow as part of a paleolithic LARP.

Another thing that complicates the 'wildlife management ' story is that, as far as I can tell, Cecil had never interfered with humans. It's one thing to cull animals that are killing livestock or humans due to being near pastures or villages, quite another to kill animals that are not.

Bowhunting is a separate, harder sport(and 'tradbow' hunting is even harder) from general rifle hunting, it is true. I'm suspecting in this case that the lion was shot with an arrow by a bushman or something, but it's not ipso-facto implausible that some bowhunter wanted to stalk a lion with a compound bow on foot. Bowhunters are crazy.

It wasn't a bushman. It was the dentist.

It's one thing to cull animals that are killing livestock or humans due to being near pastures or villages, quite another to kill animals that are not.

There is also general wildlife population control - even if, say, the wolves aren't interfering with humans/livestock, they could still be threatening to cause harm to the ecosystem via overhunting local parts of it.

How? That seems like a self correcting problem. Wolves have been around for quite a while without causing lasting harm via overhunting.

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