http://www.startribune.com/walter-palmer-speaks-hunter-who-killed-lion-will-resume-dental-practice-tuesday/325185401/
“In his first interview since killing Cecil, the Eden Prairie big-game
hunter reaffirmed that he took the lion in Zimbabwe in a legal hunt. ”
____________________
Dentist who killed Cecil the lion set to return to work
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – The Minnesota dentist whose killing of Cecil the lion sparked a global backlash emerged for an interview in which he disputed some accounts of the hunt, expressed agitation at the animosity directed at those close to him and said he would be back at work within days.
Walter Palmer, who has spent more than a month out of sight after becoming the target of protests and threats, intends to return to his suburban Minneapolis dental practice Tuesday.
In an interview Sunday evening conducted jointly by The Associated Press and the Minneapolis Star Tribune that advisers said would be the only one granted, Palmer said again that he believes he acted legally and that he was stunned to find out his hunting party had killed one of Zimbabwe’s treasured animals.
“If I had known this lion had a name and was important to the country or a study obviously I wouldn’t have taken it,” Palmer said. “Nobody in our hunting party knew before or after the name of this lion.”
Cecil was a fixture in the vast Hwange National Park and had been fitted with a GPS collar as part of Oxford University lion research. Palmer said he shot the big cat with the black mane using an arrow from his compound bow outside the park’s borders but it didn’t die immediately. He disputed conservationist accounts that the wounded lion wandered for 40 hours and was finished off with a gun, saying it was tracked down the next day and killed with an arrow.
An avid sportsman, Palmer shut off several lines of inquiry about the hunt, including how much he paid for it or others he has undertaken. No videotaping or photographing of the interview was allowed. During the 25-minute interview, Palmer gazed intensely at his questioners, often fiddling with his hands and turning occasionally to an adviser, Joe Friedberg, to field questions about the fallout and his legal situation.
Some high-level Zimbabwean officials have called for Palmer’s extradition, but no formal steps toward getting the dentist to return to Zimbabwe have been publicly disclosed. Friedberg, a Minneapolis attorney who said he is acting as an unpaid consultant to Palmer, said he has heard nothing from authorities about domestic or international investigations since early August.
Friedberg said he offered to have Palmer take questions from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service authorities on the condition the session be recorded. He said he never heard back.
“I’m not Walter’s lawyer in this situation because Walter doesn’t need a lawyer in this situation,” said Friedberg, who said he knew Palmer through previous matters. “If some governmental agency or investigative unit would make a claim that he violated some law then we’d talk about it.”
Ben Petok, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Andy Luger, declined comment about conversations with Friedberg and referred questions to Fish and Wildlife. An agency spokeswoman didn’t immediately return a call or an email Sunday evening.
After Palmer was named in late July as the hunter who killed Cecil, his Bloomington clinic and Eden Prairie home became protest sites, and a vacation property he owns in Florida was vandalized. Palmer has been vilified across social media, with some posts suggesting violence against him. He described himself as “heartbroken” for causing disruptions for staff at his clinic, which was shuttered for weeks until reopening in late August without him on the premises. And he said the ordeal has been especially hard on his wife and adult daughter, who both felt threatened.
“I don’t understand that level of humanity to come after people not involved at all,” Palmer said.
As for himself, he said he feels safe enough to return to work – “My staff and my patients support me and they want me back” – but declined to say where he’s spent the last six weeks or describe security steps he has taken.
“I’ve been out of the public eye. That doesn’t mean I’m in hiding,” Palmer said. “I’ve been among people, family and friends. Location is really not that important.”
Palmer, who has several big-game kills to his name, reportedly paid thousands of dollars for the guided hunt but wouldn’t talk money on Sunday.
Theo Bronkhorst, a professional hunter who helped Palmer, has been charged with “failure to prevent an illegal hunt.” Honest Ndlovu, whose property is near the park in western Zimbabwe, faces a charge of allowing the lion hunt to occur on his farm without proper authority.
Asked whether he would return to Zimbabwe for future hunts, Palmer said, “I don’t know about the future.” He estimated he had been there four times and said, “Zimbabwe has been a wonderful country for me to hunt in, and I have always followed the laws.”
In addition to the Cecil furor, Palmer pleaded guilty in 2008 to making false statements to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about a black bear he fatally shot in western Wisconsin outside of the authorized hunting zone. He was given one year probation and fined nearly $3,000 as part of a plea agreement.
Cecil’s killing set off a fierce debate over trophy hunting in Africa. Zimbabwe tightened regulations for lion, elephant and leopard hunting after the incident, and three major U.S. airlines changed policies to ban shipment of the trophies.
___
Associated Press writer Amy Forliti contributed.
______________________
Cecil the Lion killer Walter Palmer gives first interview – and moans
about ‘humanity’ of his critics
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/cecil-lion-killer-walter-palmer-6395203
*****
As bowhunting season opens in U.S., animal rights groups are hopping mad
http://www.morningticker.com/2015/09/as-bowhunting-season-opens-in-u-s-animal-rights-groups-are-hopping-mad/
“Bowhunting season officially began in many states across the country
on Saturday, but animal rights groups like PETA have been fuming
against this type of hunting in particular.”
Exposing the Big Game 
Hate him. Absolutely fucking hate him. I hope he suffers unrelenting pain and sorrow for the rest of his pathetic piece-of-shit life. Fucking waste of oxygen.
I am out of words..and my loathing of this sociopathic serial killer knows no bounds…
so I’m just gonna’ agree with you…
ditto…
a plague on his house for all eternity (with apologies to Shakespeare) ☻
Why is this of any importance, national or otherwise, because who really cares what this man does, or would ever believe him? We know that he cannot control himself, because he’s been caught poaching twice.
“If he’d have known the animal had a name and was part of a study, important to the country….”
Well that’s just it, isn’t it – you can’t know. Aren’t all lions (and all wildlife) important to their countries? Aren’t many of them being studied? That argument is very lame, and not believable. And his misplaced ‘heartbreak’ is very arrogant. I’m sure some of his staff and patients have probably quit on him anyway.
I hope that Zimbabwe bars him from their country forever – that’s basically all I want to hear about him. 🙂
Dr. Palmer is counting on our short attention span. He hid out for a while, let a few news cycles spin by, and is hoping that we have all moved on to another outrage. I hope he is wrong.
I didn’t notice evidence that he gave any thought to the ethics of his hunting. His only concern seemed to be that he killed the wrong lion. His other concern was that getting caught caused him and his family some discomfort. I suspect he will continue the hunting, although with less flamboyance in sharing his victory pictures.
As to the family. Most men seem to hide behind their family when they have done something egregious enough to earn them public condemnation. My message to Dr. Palmer: Sir, they are your family. It is your resonsibility to look out for their welfare. If you have casued them problems for what you did to Cecil, then shame on you doubly. As for your wife, specifically, she married you, she knows what you are, she has chosen to stay with you. Therefore, she shares your life and what you make of it.
Cecil is a symbol of all that is evil in the hunting that sealed his fate and that of numberless and nameless other victims.
Walter James Palmer, DDS, is the symbol of all this is ugly in the human beings who seek their thrill in the taking of other lives and in feeding their bloated egos on the bodies of the victims they accumulate.
“Dr. Palmer is counting on our short attention span. He hid out for a while, let a few news cycles spin by, and is hoping that we have all moved on to another outrage. I hope he is wrong.”
I hope he is wrong too. Just the very thought of, after exhausting, killing, skinning and beheading Cecil, he was panting after an elephant with big tusks, just makes me want to vomit.
Those of us with memories like elephants won’t let it be forgotten.
The ‘level of humanity’? That’s rich – many and most don’t understand the ‘level of humanity’ that would stoop to what he does for pleasure – killing and inflicting pain on sentient beings for a trophy, and endless amounts of trophies. It’s almost comical how as a defense, a lot of these people try to deflect blame and attribute violence to animal rights advocates, as usual, and protesters. Nobody has committed any violence except for people like him, and there is proof in their photos that they love to show – not baseless accusations.
Sure, I care about people – but not to the exclusion of all other living things on the planet, and bad, selfish behavior.
Watch out. Palmer is coming back with no regrets. Don’t let him do again what he did.