Walter Palmer, the Minneapolis dentist
who shot an iconic lion named Cecil just outside the safety of Hwange
National Park in Zimbawe, says he regrets his actions.
Oh my yes, he most probably does. If
you can find him, you could confirm that for yourself.
After a photo of him, smiling
triumphantly (over Cecil's corpse) shot online round the world, his
dental practice has been shuttered, with a giant poster saying Rot In
Hell taped to the door.
It took but a day for 141,000 people to
petition the White House to extradite Palmer back to Zimbawe to face
charges of poaching. (The lion — a local favourite of the
photo-safari tourist trade, and well-conditioned to be close to
humans — was allegedly lured outside of park boundaries by use of a
dead animal pulled buy a vehicle, with the surrounding area marked
with attractive scent.) As of Thursday, White House staff are saying
they are considering doing just that.
Walter Palmer has since gone to ground
and he has become prey for stalkers that only the internet —
today's ultimate predator — can create.
Well, that's $50,000 for a hunt
well-spent, isn't it?
By now the whole world knows that
Walter Palmer is a passionate hunter of endangered species. He has
the money and resources to vet that passion, and until now wasn't
that concerned who knew about it.
He hunts with a bow, which he holds to
be a more honourable way to kill endangered species. Cecil was shot
with a bow — up close enough and with a professional rifleman at
Palmer's back — but was only wounded. The alpha lion was killed 40
hours later with a rifle shot.
Speaking of being alpha, Palmer claims
he has bagged every animal but one on the Pope & Young scorecard
of 34 North American big-game animals. Pope & Young is the
bow-hunter's subset of the Boone & Crockett scoring system.
He's killed a jaguar, a bison and much
more — even a rhinoceros. He's got a houseful of exotic pelts and
regally-mounted heads with glass eyes.
And he's become another object lesson
for people who do disagreeable things to practice their disagreeable
acts in greater secrecy. If that's even possible anymore.
Rot In Hell has no wrath like that of a
mob of online shamers.
We used to think that the rise of
online communication would provide fertile ground for non-mainstream
thoughts to flourish.
That may be true for some (the
flourishing of porn and gambling, for instance), but more commonly
now, common outrage drives the agenda of ideas.
You cross certain lines at your peril,
because peril now lurks behind every online troll's vicious comments.
Who knows what actions can follow the hateful comments that get
posted online?
Even those who not cross lines lines of
social acceptability can suffer. Consider the teens hounded into
suicide by social media gangsters.
Walter Palmer is only the latest poster
boy of online hatred, desperately trying to erase his online
presence, because there's now a digital target upon him.
You may think he deserves public scorn.
I certainly do.
But what has exploded around this
wealthy dentist and his predilections for killing things is not
exactly what our freedom to communicate has promised.
Perhaps this was to be expected.
Really, there are people out there who could well use a change in
perspective. Public scorn or shaming is a pretty effective tool to do
that.
Palmer shows little mercy for his prey,
as much as he has claimed kinship in nature with them, and claims
that killing great beasts with razor-sharp arrows is a form of
honour. So he should expect little mercy from people who honour his
victims by voicing their outrage when they are killed.
But if we decry his lack of mercy, we
should show some ourselves.
Lets not allow the internet to be judge
and jury here.
I'm suggesting this guy is in a very
scary place right now, and he does not deserve to be there. At some
point, it should become safe for him to come out and show the world that
he's learned something.
You don't kill things just because you
can. It's a morality thing. We kill for food, we kill for shelter and
clothing. We even kill because we have appropriated the habitat for
our own use.
But these days, killing exotic animals
— for pleasure, for thrills, or for bragging rights — crosses a
line.
If the internet can be any good here,
it can be to stop the practice of trophy hunting, without harm to its
(hopefully former) practitioners.
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