Animal cruelty

The killing for ‘sport’ of a lion in Zimbabwe, believed to be the son of the famous Cecil the Lion, should come as no surprise.

Cecil’s demise in 2015 at the hands of a wealthy big-game hunter sparked an international outcry, and rightly so. Many endangered wildlife species are targeted by people whose idea of fun is to tease, torture, or cruelly kill magnificent creatures and then pose for pictures by the mangled, bleeding carcasses.

Donald Trump Jr has shot elephants and showed off their severed tails to photographers.

But we Irish aren’t in a position to throws stones. We don’t have elephants, lions, or rhinos in Ireland but we do have hares and foxes, both of which are subjected to deliberate cruelty with the full backing of the State and our legal system.

Each coursed hare is a little Hibernian Cecil that so-called sportspeople like to see terrorised and battered on rain-swept fields in winter.

The hare is a timid creature that could never hope to roar like a lion, but whose death screech has been likened to that of the mythical banshee. Brave punters cheer as it is sent somersaulting into the air like a sliotar on its way over the bar at a hurling match. The hare whose bones are crushed by two turbo-charged dogs is as much a victim of man’s perennial inhumanity as any exotic animal in the jungles or the great plains of Asia or Africa.

John Fitzgerald, Callan, Co. Kilkenny.