Hunting For Answers

I'm still not sure what what to feel about the killing of Cecil the lion. Like many people, I'm not happy about it. But I can't pretend to be a great friend of animals, as a non-vegetarian. That's a debate a lot of people have been having online: vegetarians questioning the integrity of those concerning the death of an animal. I don't have a real good answer for that. I guess it comes down to hunting itself.

I generally don't like the idea of killing animals, but have justified meat-eating to myself on the grounds that it's killing animals for something important and unavoidable: food. I acknowledge that this reasoning is flimsy, since a human can survive without eating meat, even if that's not the natural lifestyle for homo sapiens.

On the other hand, consider activities that are common targets of the animal rights movement: hunting, fur, and cosmetic experimentation. Those are trading animal lives for less-integral, more easily-replaced things. In the issue at hand - hunting - you're trading an animal's life for your own entertainment. That's a proposition I've always had difficulty buying.

In this case, at least some of the anger is that this was a particular lion. People had an attachment to it, so there's extra emotion. But that also begs the question of why we both allow hunting, but also pick out a specific animal as untouchable. After all, it’s hard to say, go ahead and kill any of these animals, just not that one over there.

It's weird how public opinion has turned here. If you watch politics, you see how sometimes a determined minority can hold sway in society. The most obvious example of this is the American gun "debate" (I put it in quotes because really there in no debate) where the enthusiastic and well-organized gun lobby always gets its way, even when it is on the less-popular side of an issue. But it seems like now we could be seeing two of those determined minorities face off: There's a wave of opinion against hunting at the same time, and in the same place, that politicians regularly make a show of going hunting as a way of proving their qualifications.

But a big part of the anger is clearly about the hunter himself. A lot of the coverage of the incident emphasizes that he's a dentist. Some of the anger is, I'm sure, due to widespread hatred of dentists. But I think more of it is the incongruity of a big-game-hunting dentist, and the transparent desperation for masculinity. That just accents the difficulty accepting hunting I mentioned above. This lion appears to have been sacrificed not just for entertainment, but to prove a man's virility. Or, to put it another way, everything we say about the Chinese when they drive an animal to the edge of extinction because they've decided one of its body parts is an aphrodisiac, all applies here too.

Another thing that’s happened recently perhaps explains the anger over Cecil, and that is the demise of Hitchbot, the hitchhiking robot. In a story that reaffirmed everyone’s national stereotypes, the helpless and immobile robot successfully hitchhiked across Canada and Europe, then got destroyed after only a tenth of its journey across the United States. No, I’m not claiming that the loss of a not-even-close-to-sentient robot is the equivalent of a living thing. But it’s the same sort of equation: one person decides that the enjoyment they get out of destroying something outweighs the enjoyment many may get from its continued existence. And that’s where the frustration comes from: it’s a pattern we’ve all seen throughout our lives, and feel unable to prevent.