I'm always fascinated by the psychology of eating animals, and how society decides which ones are acceptable to eat and which ones aren't. Not that I'm any exception to it, of course, but I at least try to look at it from the outside a bit.

We have a diver who killed an animal for food, and this generated tremendous outrage. Why?

It's certainly not the bare fact that he killed an animal for food. That happens all the time, and people mostly don't care.

He ended up doing it in front of a crowd, but that's not the reason either. If he had killed, say, a trout in front of a crowd, nobody would really care.

Nor is it the kind of animal that he killed, not alone. If he had done it in private then told the public about what happened, there would have been no outcry.

Clearly it's some combination of the kind of animal and doing it in public. There's no particular reason either one should matter, though. There is, it appears, nothing particularly special about this animal that makes it a bad choice for food compared to other animals. But clearly it does matter.

I think it comes down to the simple fact that this was an unusual event. And though there was nothing specific about this event that should lead to outcry, the mere fact that it was unusual is enough. A lot of city dwellers are fundamentally uncomfortable with eating meat. Most of them still do it, but they hide behind the various structures that exist between the living animal and their dinner plate to kind of ignore it. I've heard of people seriously saying things like, "It's wrong to kill an animal for meat. You should just buy it from the grocery store." I'm sure most people are not that ignorant, but there's a similar sort of avoiding thinking about the stark reality of slaughtering and butchering.

So you have a bunch of people suddenly confronted with that which they try to ignore. Some of them are outraged by the mechanics of killing and eating an animal. But most of them still eat cows and pigs and chickens which are routinely killed in ways not really different from this. What reason could there be for their outrage, then? It can't be that they're outraged at the overall concept of killing an animal for food. But, ah hah! This is an unusual animal, so it must be that!

And that, I think, is how you end up with a conservation campaign for an animal that is not endangered and not, ultimately, all that special.

I could be way off, but it's interesting to think about.