Cecil, Zimbabwe’s famous lion, was killed by an American dentist | Hacker News Reader

Cecil, Zimbabwe’s famous lion, was killed by an American dentist

qz.com

19 pointspmcpinto12 comments

I distinctly understand hunting wildlife to eat, are causing danger to your property or if they are causing harm to your land (like wild hogs overpopulated in Most of Texas), however I will never understand hunting these exotic and largely docile creatures.

Just absolutely disgusting.

I've never had much of an inclination to hunt myself, but I know a guy who periodically makes hunting trips in Africa. According to him the meat is usually given to local villagers. They also target older males in the group to give younger males the chance to mate. I have no idea if any of that happened in this particular hunt, though. (I'm also relating this all second-hand, so I can't totally vouch for its accuracy.)

Could you understand hunting humans to eat them? If a child decided to ruin your flowerbed, should it be ok to shoot the child? The evolutionary gap between lions and humans is only in the tens of millions of years. In my opinion, it should only be acceptable to kill animals in self defense. They are all conscious beings like us. That said, I'm not a vegetarian, and I care more about my selfish desires than what is right or wrong.

This seems like practically the archetype of the current events story the guidelines ask people not to upvote. Please join me in flagging it off the site.

Deleted comment

For the most part i agree with you, but there is another aspect. I grew up hunting, and for the most part, I'd characterize the hunters I knew growing up as ardent conservationists (look at the work of duck unlimited), and those hunters would view killing a species under pressure or of conservation value as unconscionable. Point is, most hunters want to see the species that they hunt to thrive - this is the antithesis of that.

I'm not sure what this lion possesses above everything else, but apparently it's more outrageous to kill it than say a deer or cow.

He was part of a research project. People knew him by name. That alone doesn't make him special than others, but when an animal has a name, it is being tracked, people are working with it etc, then they feel a connection to it. Versus an unnamed animal. We all love our dogs (and other pets) while simultaneously eating pork, drinking milk etc without feeling any sympathy or love for the torture these animals go through in factory farms. Simply because these animals are "out of sight", so we don't feel anything for them (that is why the animal industry fights so hard to make it difficult to film the atrocities - using ag-gag laws etc).

None of the above is to say what we are doing (or not doing) is right. Simply that humans feel a connection to things they know and identify.

I'm equally outraged by bullfighting in Spain, don't worry.

I should probably be similarly outraged by killing animals for food, but there's something about it being done purely for entertainment that is particularly sickening.

I think it sucks that Cecil was killed, but the dentist thought he was hunting legally.

This dentist doesn't have a leg to stand on though bc he has previously been charged with killing a black bear on illegal land and dragging the black bear many miles to a legal hunting area.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/cecil-lion-killer-walter-j...

That doesn't really prove much for this particular case though, other than a mob with pitchforks is combing through is history.

The dentist lured Cecil onto private land from a national park to shoot it. It's illegal to shoot animals from national parks and he was inside the park when they lured Cecil out. He was a part of that. And then he shot it. I don't care if he had permits to kill animals on private land when what he did was take an animal from public to private land. It would be kind of like scanning a computers ports, then hacking to it and bricking it, get caught and claim that scanning the ports is legal so the rest should be too.

He should be extradited to Zimbabwe to face the criminal charges brought against him.

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