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Notes -
Anyone remember the affair of Cecil the Lion that was also around that time (seems like about a year before the affair of Harambe)? I recalled that it caused a bunch of drama online similar to Harambe, and then suddenly no one ever talked about it again. I'm always reminded of it when I run into Jimmy Kimmel on the news or social media, because he famously shed tears on his show while talking about the affair. I think these and Kony, referenced in another comment, stick to memories for being some of the earlier examples of social media hot flashes that tore through the internets and then went away, which became very common and even the default in the past decade.
With 2014 online drama being defined by the affair of reproductively viable worker ants, I wonder if future historians will think we just had a really strange animal-loving phase in the mid-2010s.
What I remember about Cecil is the doctor who shot him totally being dragged for it, but a few people interviewed some Africans and they were like "Lions? They suck, dude. They eat my friends. Americans will kill them and pay us for the privilege? Cool!" (OK, not in those exact words)
According to the Wikipedia article, it seems that there was a "Cecil Effect" in Zimbabwe after the affair, where westerners hunting lions there became less common than otherwise would have been expected, resulting in less pleasant lives for the locals due to more lions and less money. I don't know much about the trophy hunting business, but what little I know about it from podcasts and radio shows makes me not surprised; it always seemed to me that westerners paying huge sums of money to hunt exotic animals in Africa was almost an unalloyed good, with the only significant downsides being for the individual animals themselves and other westerners who care more about optics or suffering of animals than about the suffering of other humans. The "I consent! I consent! I don't!" meme comes to mind.
Trophy hunting big five animals costs the equivalent of over a decade's labour in local salaries and employs far more local servants than you'd expect- in the west trophy hunting would usually be limited to guides and taxidermists(the guide field dresses), but lower African labour costs also justify skinning teams, personal servants, etc etc.
Add to that that subsistence farmers generally do not like charismatic megafauna very much, including apex predators(which eat their stock and occasionally them). Rural folk in the US hate wolves too(and would probably hate mammoth if they still existed), but lions are much more likely to hunt both livestock and humans.
Yes - when done responsibly, it's both wildlife management and local economic injection. But a lot of people cannot conceive of hunting as being anything other than cruel and harmful. Probably part of a general idea of humans being "outside of nature", part "exploitation of poor minorities in 3rd world countries", part "hating anyone rich enough to do so", and part "poaching in Africa is what Victorian British people did".
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.
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.
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