Trophy Hunting – Cecil the Lion and Theodore Roosevelt’s tied up bear.

Cecil the lion was quite an attraction at the Hwange National Park. He’d become quite habituated to humans and thousands delighted at watching him with his pride of females and cubs. He was a magnificent specimen.

Walter Palmer is a dentist who likes killing things. He particularly likes killings predators that are rare and endangered. He has pictures of himself with a murdered leopard and has been fined for illegally killing a Black Bear.

Walter Palmer likes to shoot large animals, skin them and cut their heads off so that he can hang them on the wall as a trophies. That’s what he did with Cecil. That’s a strange thing to do. It says a lot about his psychology. He wants to be a big-game hunter; a tough guy, macho-man. He looks like a nerd. He obviously thinks he is Ernest Hemingway. That’s a big psychological weakness.

Walter Palmer paid £32,000 for the privilege of killing Cecil. He went with a group of African hunters and you can be sure that at no time was his life at risk.

They enticed Cecil out of the reserve. Walter shot him with a cross-bow. Cecil, severely injured, escaped and it took 40 hours for him to be found and shot.

Cecil, used to humans as he was, could hardly have been a difficult proposition. I cannot imagine the difficulty in hunting Cecil; the daring involved, the hardship and danger.

Back in 1902 Theodore Roosevelt went on a hunting trip to kill black bears. After days he still had not found one. The other hunters, eager that Theodore should not have a wasted trip, found an old bear who became wounded in the process, tied him to a tree and went to get Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot the shackled bear because he thought it would be unsportsman-like. The story gave rise to the ‘Teddy bear’.

Obviously Theodore Roosevelt was more of a man that Walter Palmer.

The question that remains is – What should we do with these poachers and hunters who are decimating the remaining wild-life?