Walter Palmer, killer dentist
What kind of person could take joy in the killing of a magnificent animal?
Physicist Stephen Hawking and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak were among a thousand of the world’s best brains who this week warned of the advance of robotic, remorseless killing machines.
You know, like the Minnesota dentist who killed Cecil the lion, the pride of Zimbabwe, for fun while on vacation.
Not since the sadistic Orin Scrivello, DDS, trilled “Who wants their teeth done by the Marquis de Sade?” in the musical “Little Shop of Horrors” has a dentist been so despised. In the 1986 movie, comedian Steve Martin played the dentist who, as a child, poisoned guppies and shot puppies with a BB gun, causing his mother to suggest he become a dentist because “you have a talent for causing things pain.”
By killing an internationally loved lion that had been studied by Oxford researchers for 16 years, Walter J. Palmer makes that movie seem not so much comedy as biopic. He is not the killer robot that Mr. Hawking and others decried in their open letter against autonomous weapons. He’s something worse: flesh and blood, devoid of conscience. A tin man has no heart, but at least he’s got an excuse.
Not Mr. Palmer, of Eden Prairie, Minn., who seems to think he’s the victim here because he had obtained all the proper permits before piercing Cecil’s belly with an arrow, then tracking the dying lion for two days before shooting him dead. “Obviously, some things are being misreported,” he said Tuesday, about the same time that the Facebook page, Twitter account and website of his River Bluff Dental practice went dark, the administrators likely weary of deleting angry comments, the more humane of which recommended that Mr. Palmer be fed to lions.
Media reports suggest Mr. Palmer may escape justice because he allegedly paid $55,000 to take part in the hunt near, but not on, a famed preserve. Apparently, it is not illegal to lure animals out of their safe zones, and how was he to know that the lion his guides pointed out was an international celebrity?
The Zimbabwe courts will figure this out. But even if there is no official punishment, Mr. Palmer might as well stay over there and become the second-most prominent American in exile. It will be a long time — say, forever — before he’s welcome here. Say what you will about the character of Edward Snowden, the Wikileaker hiding from American jurisprudence somewhere in Russia. His activities, while criminal, at least did some good.
Not so the murderous antics of Mr. Palmer, whose kills — legal and not — serve no purpose beyond bragging rights. On the Internet, he poses, smiling, with his kills: a lion, a leopard, a rhinoceros. It is a photo gallery that could be used by Bernie Sanders to demonstrate the virtue of socialism: You can’t trust rich people to do smart things with their money.
Unfortunately, Mr. Palmer is not the only American who takes sick pleasure in watching large animals die on alien continents. About 1,000 captive lions are shot each year by trophy hunters from America and Europe, The Economist reported earlier this year. Most of the hunters are men; but not all. Earlier this year, comedian Ricky Gervais lit into a woman, Rebecca Francis, for posing provocatively with a giraffe she had shot. Last year, a Texas cheerleader was called “the most hated woman on the Web” for nauseating photos she posted on Facebook showing her with wild animals she had killed.
When the Internet vitriol gets to be too much to bear, the indignant killers sob that the hunters have become the hunted. Ms. Francis, whose website (what one commentator called “a Noah’s ark of dead animals”) is now down, said she killed the giraffe out of kindness; poor thing was lonely and old. She did herself no favors by posing, smiling, by the corpse. More than the killings, it is the images that give oxygen to rage and pose the question for which there is no acceptable answer: How can any good person derive joy from killing another creature, even if it’s to sate hunger or protect human life?
Of course, lions kill, too, savagely and without remorse. Two months ago, a New York woman was fatally mauled in South Africa while photographing a lioness through an open window. Two weeks ago, two male lions took down an antelope while surrounded by cars full of shocked tourists.
So, for all of Cecil’s grandeur, it helps — just a little — to remember that he was no Simba, Disney’s affable Lion King. He was a roaring embodiment of Tennyson’s truth: Nature, red in tooth and claw. But, as it was said of another lion king, Aslan in C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” “’ Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said “compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character.” Who wants their teeth done by the Marquis de Sade?
Nobody, let’s hope.