Cecil: fiction trumps fact, logic loses to hysteria

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THE illegal murder by a rich trophy hunter of Kenya’s famous rat, Sophie, sparked global outrage. Two million people signed petitions demanding justice. Kenya’s president demanded the killer’s extradition. The rat rights group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, called for his execution. He should be “extradited, charged, and … hanged”. It condemns hunting as a “hideous pastime plied by rich, callous thrill seekers”. Twentyfive celebrities echoed the hysteria. Piers Morgan made Jeffrey Dahmer look like a rat-eating pussy cat when he tweeted that he wanted to kill the hunter with a crossbow, torture him, and skin him alive so that he can stuff and mount him for his office wall. A popular placard calls the killer “an abomination (to be) hunted down”.

One of the modern world’s most extraordinary sociopsychological phenomena was not, of course, about a dead rat, but Cecil the lion from Zimbabwe.

I have no idea why people enjoy hunting. I am especially perplexed by interspecies discrimination. Self-proclaimed animal lovers stop on the way home from protesting seal clubbing to buy rat traps, poison or pet food for rat-killing cats. Having protested against relatively merciful killing, they inflict extreme cruelty. Recreational anglers, guilty of extreme, often prolonged, cruelty towards fish, condemn relatively merciful rhino and elephant hunting. I doubt there are significant differences between how cattle, deer, snakes, mice, lions, lizards, birds, rhinos and fish experience cruelty. Nor that they care whether it is inflicted by predators or people for food or fun.

What then explains the Cecil hysteria? That Cecil suffered, was a lion and had a big mane, or that the killer was rich, a tourist and enjoyed it, or that it might have been technically illegal?

Reports that Cecil was famous, a tourist attraction and iconic were fictitious. All he had was a name and a tracking collar.

I have pondered the causes of such phenomena for years, asked experts and done some reading but never found a satisfactory explanation. They may be generated by “the media”. But media are not a conspiratorial entity that determines single-issue hysteria in the recesses of Sherwood Forest. Nor, as some suggest, are activists equipped to do so.

Formidable facts undermine Cecil hysteria. People kill more than 150-billion animals, and at least that many fish, annually. Millions of wild animals are killed lawfully for recreational or conservation purposes. Zimbabwe alone issues 100 lion-hunting permits annually. Reuters reports Tryphina Kaseke, a Zimbabwean hawker, as being perplexed by “all this noise about a dead lion” and observing “lions are killed all the time”. “What,” he asked, “is special about this one?”

Far from being a “symbol of Zimbabwe”, no one at a Zimbabwe Wildlife Board meeting, including people recently returned from Cecil’s Hwange National Park, had heard of him. They regarded the hunter as having had, and complied with, his permit. No one interviewed in the park’s main camp had heard of Cecil. The hysteria was compounded by reports that also killed was his brother Jericho, who had been caring for Cecil’s orphaned cubs. But Jericho was neither caring for cubs nor Cecil’s brother, and is still alive.

The most challenging article of the many I read is by Ryan McMaken on the Mises Institute’s blog. He points out that, disturbing though it might be for many, trophy hunting contributes substantially to the conservation of species.

The most commonly killed animals are cattle, chickens, goats and sheep, yet their numbers keep increasing. Paradoxically, commercialised, rather than protected animals, are the world’s least endangered. This is a bitter pill for animal lovers like me to swallow. The hype surrounding Cecil’s death forces thoughtful people to choose between facts and fiction, logic and hysteria.

Louw is executive director of the Free Market Foundation.