A nation that cares more about an old lion than old people

THE world was rightly repulsed by the slaughter of Cecil, the 13-year-old lion lured from the protection of a Zimbabwe national park to be slaughtered by a wealthy U.S. dentist.

Walter Palmer wounded Cecil with a high-powered bow and arrow, leaving him to stagger off and endure 40 hours in agony before he was tracked down and finally put to death.

Such has been the worldwide outrage that Palmer’s dental practice has been boycotted, he has gone into hiding and Brits have donated some £300,000 to the Oxford University conservation team who had been monitoring Cecil.

Yet where was the national outrage when the Daily Mail revealed six years ago that thousands of elderly men and women were deliberately being left to die in harrowing conditions in our own hospitals on the Liverpool Care Pathway?

Under this system, fluids and food were withdrawn from patients with terminal conditions, leaving them to die, often in agony. The suffering they endured in their final hours was every bit as barbaric as poor Cecil’s — and it wasn’t just one bloodthirsty dentist to blame, but the whole medical establishment.

When the Mail campaigned against the Pathway, it was vilified by doctors’ leaders, who accused it of ‘counterproductive’ reporting.

Now, finally, an official inquiry has endorsed the Mail’s findings and ruled that the practice must stop. Yet the fact that it was allowed to continue for so long is a national disgrace.

Dr Tony Cole, chairman of the medical Ethics Alliance, said he was contacted just last week by a man concerned about his elderly mother’s treatment in hospital.

She had not been given a drink of water for eight days, was distressed, and her tongue was so dry and shrivelled that it resembled a walnut.

As the saying goes: you wouldn’t treat an animal like that.

I’m all for protecting creatures like Cecil, but what a warped world we live in when the torment of an old lion provokes national outrage, while the cruel deaths of thousands of elderly people barely raise a murmur.

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