OK, Cecil is dead. Take a deep breath.

Native people don’t like lions much; they kill livestock and threaten humans.

I suspect we have all gained some perspective on the Cecil the Lion thing. At first, it was a vibrant cartoon of postcolonial perfidy — a high-living Minnesota dentist specializing in killing biggame animals, a beloved 13-year-old lion who was known by name to visitors of the game park where he lived, the headless corpse found on the veld.

Cecil had been illegally lured to his death, reports said, with trails of bait that led him out of his protected habitat, then wounded with an arrow, then tracked two days before he was shot — and his head chopped off for a trophy.

Dr. Walter Palmer was a classic entitled Western jerkwad, who sought pleasure in killing large animals that could not fight against bullets and $10,000 archery bows. What must he have been thinking as he watched the slow decapitation? “This should cure my impotence problem”?

But, worse luck, there are complications. Don’t you hate that? Can’t we vilify without fear of nuance? That’s the world I want.

Start here: Hunting is a well-known technique of wildlife management. Too great a concentration of anything disturbs the wellbeing of everything. It is necessary to cull the herd. Something always will, sooner or later: starvation or exposure or a pack of predators.

To maintain a sustainable balance, human intervention is required. Happens all over the United States every year; famously happened with the fallow deer in Point Reyes over the last few years. It is not clear to me that killing by humans is worse than more natural forms of premature death.

Indeed, some would argue that there is no distinction between the two. They are both parts of nature, and what we do is by definition natural. There’s no real difference between a building and a tree. Buckminster Fuller said: “Man does not spontaneously recognize technology other than his own, so he speaks of the rest as something he ignorantly calls nature.”

It should also be said that the “sustainability” problem is really a land-use problem. If we hadn’t built all this stuff everywhere, then we wouldn’t have so much habitat destruction, which is why there are too many animals on not enough land. But we are the irresistible species, and now we have to scramble to avoid killing all the rest of the animals.

Which gets into the interesting question: Who are we to manage anything? We could be saving the fairy toad and meanwhile preventing the vital Cures-cancerium plant from growing. Is our track record that great? We have been whipped into a lather of too-late-now nostalgia for doomed things like polar bears and Oahu tree snails. Cycles of life and all that.

On the other hand: You broke it, you bought it. We have an obligation to try to fix what we messed up so badly.

But it wasn’t our fault. That’s how we’ve always worked. We kill things. Let us travel 4 million years or so back in time. There are our little ancestors (and they were little), racing around the plains of Africa hunting and killing other animals, using our large brains instead of our large size.

We are omnivores. It’s an attractive survival strategy.

We were wild animals ourselves, just little beasties living on tree rats and hiding from rhinoceroses. We’d kill a lion the way they’re still being killed today, with guile and teamwork. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that recreational killing is still a thing. And it pales in the face of industrialized killing. The animal rights people know enough to hitch their star to any burst of popular outrage, but also they know where the real slaughter is going on. It’s not lab animals; it’s not even purveyors of fine fur outerwear. We just kill a hell of a lot of cows. We don’t mount their heads on anything. It’s no manly triumph to kill a cow. But we do kill them, because we eat meat. Remember all that running around the veld? That’s why. So maybe Walter Palmer wasn’t a conscious agent of the devil so much as a primitive social type.

Because, really, the conversation about animal rights and animal management is a hard one. It’s easy to say, “Oh, I only eat vegetables,” but you have a choice. Would you kill or be killed? Would you go all Quaker in the face of a ravening wolf pack? Or would you kill those suckers and freeze their meat for later consumption? Assume you were in a remote Arctic cabin.

Hard to be a vegetarian in the Arctic. Not enough vegetables.

Cecil the Lion was named for Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate and politician in South Africa who was responsible for numerous dreadful antiblack laws and regulations. Now we are at the intersection of social history and scientific history; best to back slowly away from the device.