Lay Cecil the Lion to Rest on the White House Lawn
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
02 August 15
Blame for the death of Cecil the Lion lies squarely with the U.S.
government. For decades, the White House and its conservation agencies have
turned a blind eye to the well-being of wildlife in North America and
around the world. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that inaction
would lead to their endangerment and often extinction.
*The Fish and Wildlife Service Is Investigating*
From Laury Parramore, damage control specialist, U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service: “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is investigating the
circumstances surrounding the killing of Cecil the Lion.”
Sounds like the FWS is keeping busy on this, but the fact that lions in the
wild have been critically endangered and face total extinction in less than
< http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112797857/lions-nearly-extinct-40-years-030613/>
perhaps as little as 40 years
< http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112797857/lions-nearly-extinct-40-years-030613/>
has been well known to the FWS for decades.
In searching for the truth, the Fish and Wildlife Service might well
investigate itself. As recently as October 2014, the FWS *rejected
< https://firstforhunters.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/fws-rejects-attempts-to-stop-lion-hunting/>*
Endangered
Species status for African lions, saying that sport-hunting was “not found
to be a threat to the species at this time.” The Safari Club International
(SCI) was ecstatic. Their headline called the ruling a “Major Setback for
Anti-Hunting Efforts!”
https://exposingthebiggame.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/was-cecil-the-lions-death-business-as-usual/
Exposing the Big Game 
The more I head about government cover-ups and the pandering that goes on, the more I’m thinking that not voting is the moral choice. People may go to Washington, DC, with the best intentions (well, a few might), but they find out once there how trapped they’ll be in a increasing corrupt and greedy system. A pox on all their houses. I’m tired of voting for the best of the worst.
“Hunters Lead War on Wildlife”: And I would add ranchers and wildlife agencies, extraction industries and developers and outfitter organization, i.e. Safari Club, Montana Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation: Hunters and trappers have been calling themselves conservationists lately a lot it seems. Hunters create a distortion in wildlife ecology that is not natural. Hunting and trapping are no longer natural. Killing wildlife for fun is not a sport and is not healthy behavior. Hunters often cite early conservationists and early efforts to save game species (birds and ungulate herds) and fishes and on-going efforts to save game animals (killing targets for sportsmen). Some early “hunter-trapper conservationists” of considerable note were early pioneers in conservation in some forms of conservation: Teddy Roosevelt was one and he also founded numerous national parks and wildlife refuges to protect wildlife from hunter-trapper sportsmen. Aldo Leopold was one, an avid hunter, and naturalist, who became more enlightened about protecting the wolf, a few on the landscape anyway, and other predators and their place in the ecology. George Grinnell was one and also founded national parks including Glacier. I have met and know some hunters that like a balanced ecology of predators and prey, a true wilderness in which to hunt, and who disagree with trophy hunting and are even disgusted by it– and one who compares killing wolves to shooting his neighbor’s German Shepherd. But such hunter-sportsmen are far from often on the landscape; most have a very irrational, uninformed, visceral hate of wolves in particular and predators in general and want to minimize, marginalize, or exterminate them and essentially farm ungulates and game birds; as Aldo Leopold once did. Some even hate raptors who take “their” birds and “their” fish, as they view ungulates as “their” elk or deer. Most sportsmen and state wildlife agencies, it seems, want to marginalize the main predators (wolf, lion, grizzly). Nebraska only has about 70 cougars yet is embarking on a vigorous “management” campaign, as is SD with only 170 cougars. Alaska is killing wolves just outside national parks; Denali National Park has loss 2/3 of it’s’ wolves, negatively affecting wolf watching opportunities. Since wolves have been turned over to state “management” 2700 wolves have been killed plus another 3435 by the rogue USDA Wildlife Services which kills 3-4 million animals a year in the name of control. Organizations of sportsmen such as the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation has given money, recently $25,000 to MT FWP for wolf “management”, has offered bounties and cooperative agreements with agencies for wolf killing; and the Montana Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife recently donated $15,000 to Wildlife Services USDA, the renegade killing wildlife agency.Sportsmen organizations are silent on predators if not unashamedly hostile but loud on protecting and farmed game species. There are wildlife killing contests going on all over the USA and in some places, like TX, weekly. Hunters even call these killing contests conservation, killing coyotes for instance to save deer. States like ID-MT-WY-WI-MI have vigorous unscientific, political drive down the wolf population policies: trapping, extended seasons, and liberal kill policies year around. In 2014 hunters in WI are allowed to use dogs, up to six each, and killed 65 wolves in 4 days. Much of this wildlife killing is done by trapping, a barbaric, horrendous way to kill and mostly unjustified. Trapping on public land is done for “recreational” sports killing, the fur trade, trophies, with little regard for ecology and the interests of the general public, wildlife viewing, safety of the general public, and it takes a large toll in collateral damage to non-targeted animals, and is overly touted as need to control. There is some need for handling “nuisance animals” but the notion is abused with too little evaluation of the need, too little scientific management and too much good old boy political management, too little nonlethal means used; basically trapping is a quick draw response and such a barbaric, inherently cruel means of “management” that it should be under tight scrutiny with a public panel oversight and used only by wildlife agencies sparingly. Trapping and hunting is really profiteering on wildlife as a renewable resource. There are around 7000 trappers in Montana alone doing it mostly for personal gain from the fur trade. In the case of killing African wildlife for big bucks, trophy hunters are not conservationists. LIon populations are down 40%. An elephant is killed about every hour. Rhino numbers are way down. We should just stop trophy hunting at all in Africa and here; stop animal parts imports. Walter Palmer the lion poacher, killer of Cecil the lion, should be fined and maybe even jailed by Zimbabwe and barred from the country and probably from even hunting in this country.
Aldo Leopold, is considered a “pioneer” of wildlife management, a “science”, he defined as “the art of making land produce sustained annual crops of wild game for recreational use” (Wikipedia, Wildlife Management). He was one of the early supporters of predator control for the benefit of increasing recreational killing opportunities for hunters in game herds (called game farming nowadays). He supposedly saw the wisdom of having a “few” wolves on the landscape after just opportunistically shooting one because it came into his gunsight. He witnessed the light going out of the wolf’s eyes as she died and experienced remorse. He had been responsible for killing about 300 southwestern wolves in “predator control” (Game Management, Aldo Leopold, 1933). It is uncertain, I think, that he would have come around to balanced wildlife ecology, rather some kind of minimalist, marginalizing view of predators, the hunter attitudes of game farming for maximum recreational killing. He was a hunter with hunter values, and probably rancher values and mythology and, veiled and open, irrational bias against predators, seeing them as ravagers of ungulates rather than healthy positive cascading apex predator effects. After all, wildlife was to be “managed” as an annual recreational killing harvest and controlled as pests. So, Aldo Leopold was not the conservationist he has been romanticized to be, but rather an avid “hunter conservationist” and a wildlife “agency conservationist”, the very people who are often if not usually the enemy of the wolf, and other predators. But, he may have evolved.
References:
Game Management, Aldo Leopold, 1933
Wikipedia, Wildlife Management
Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
What’s horrible about it is that whatever hunters did in the 19th/early 20th century and before no longer exists. It never was ethical, wanton waste of animals and wildlands in foreign countries (pre-European settled US included), but today, not only have hunters ethics and skills declined (they do not want to expend any extra effort and want a prize virtually delivered to them), animal numbers are precipitously low due to human activities and habitat loss/destruction. Except for possibly the deer that our screwed-up practices have caused to have no natural predators anymore to keep their numbers down (except for the human automobile).
I hate to say it, but there really was some conquering/destructive/greedy gene in white Europeans and what they have done to the world, where they do not appreciate anything unless money can be made from it.
This is a comment that I think sums up what we all are thinking in response to this repugnant event, by an American, no less. It was in response to the op-ed in the NYT entitled ‘In Zimbabwe, We Don’t Cry for Our Lions’:
“As a native of Zimbabwe, I appreciate what you wrote but let me provide some context for why the actions of Walter Palmer (the killer of Cecil) struck me in particular and some others as so repugnant and disgusting.
During the peak of Western imperialism, when ignorant Englishman like Cecil Rhodes plundered entire continents and arbitrarily carved out huge areas of land to be turned into their personal fiefdoms (like Rhodesia–now Zimbabwe), it was pretty common for white Europeans to go to Africa and shoot all sorts of living creatures–elephants, gorillas, lions, giraffes, and natives of the continent as well.
The American most well-known for engaging in this sort of activity was Theodore Roosevelt, US president from 1901 to 1909. Revisionist views of Roosevelt haven’t looked upon him too kindly. Largely ignorant of the world, he was a precursor to the bloodthirsty neoconservative types of today who would like to see US armed forces invade Iran and overthrow the government there. His prosecution of war in the Philippines was awful and ruthless. He believed in white supremacy.
And he liked going to Africa to shoot and kill animals. Too many Americans are Teddy Roosevelt wannabes who fantasize about going to Africa and doing the same thing. This isn’t about being patronizing and presuming to tell Africans how to handle their affairs, at least for me. The uproar over Cecil is a reflection of the enormous disgust that some Americans feel towards their fellow Americans.
As far as the false dichotomy of ‘caring about animals means you don’t care about human suffering’ – we have the ability to stop or at lease lessen considerably poverty and war, but we do not and never have. If every last animal on the planet was gone due to extinction, we’d still be the biggest danger to life on earth.
All the outrage over the death of Cecil seemed to be a hopeful sign. Maybe, I thought, people will see in the death of this one lion a symbol of all that ugly in trophy hunting and all hunting. But now the backlash is gearing up. The hunters are bringing up their old tired excuses: They always eat what they kill; human beings have always hunted and killed; hunting is part of our culture in the tradition of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone; hunting conserves wildlife and helps the animals become better in the long run. Right! A few evolve, as Aldo Leopold did when he saw the green fire die in the eyes of the old wolf he shot. In his later years, Edward Abbey may have had second thoughts about the harmless rabbit he gratuitously killed. But it is hard to imagine any of the Idaho wolf haters or the pompous, arrogant killers like Palmer or Seski undergoing such a metamorphosis. So the trolls are out demeaning the people who are repelled by the photos of magnificent dead animals and over-the-hill men or young bimbos beaming over their handiwork and declaring their intentions to keep the weapons ready.
The second group of trolls is out scolding those who object to the killing by demanding to know why they aren’t helping “the children” or disadvantaged human groups or trying to stop abortion–anything but fighting for animals. How dare they demand a hierarchy of merit with H. sapiens at the top and every other living being at the bottom! Most people do not have the time, energy, or resources to fight every battle, and they have the right to choose which one to join, not to mention that human-centered organizations far outnumber and outspend those for animals and that there will always be people in trouble because people cause many of their own problems. I just hope that people will not give up fighting trophy hunting or other causes. This did shake things up and concentrate people’s attention.
By the way, did anyone else see the pictures of Cecil in the light show on the Empire State Building? It was a beautiful display of the animals that are being threatened, and Cecil was given his place.
Yes, it was beautiful. Many times I just love NY. I’m going to buy a Cecil tribute beanie too. I know it’s all after the fact, but I do think the majority of people are speaking up and out – I’ve never seen such a response! Let the fans of killing continue with their propaganda; they’ll just continue to get hammered because their arguments are all illogical fallacies. The bottom line is they are supporting illegal poaching.
Compassionate people are compassionate about people and animals, there’s no need to continue to have that archaic divide. Everything these people do harkens back to less enlightened times. It cannot be stressed enough: the population of animals in modern times is dangerously low. If they say that legal hunting ‘helps conservation’ of these increasingly endangered animals (and I don’t believe it), illegal poaching undermines any minimal conservation progress made. Does anyone know how or is there a guesstimate of many animals are poached?
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