I've been thinking an awful lot about Cecil the lion this week. The world has been rightfully horrified about his illegal death at the hands of a hapless Minnesotan dentist. I am glad that there has been such an outcry. Perhaps, in some karmic shift of knowledge and eventual power, Cecil's death may not have been in vain. Perhaps we all, as a culture, will come together and agree that it is wrong to kill any animal for sport, let alone one that is in real danger of soon being non-existent on this planet.
Cecil lived in a national park, which in theory should have protected him from the type of person who, for their hard-earned escape from the doldrums of their humdrum molar-inspecting existence, would not choose a nice little mini-break in Puerto Vallarta, or even a long weekend in the Big Apple basking in the megawatt glow of Broadway's finest, but instead a trip to the other side of the world with the sole, thrilling intent of killing a fellow creature using their archery prowess. Or attempting to. The saddest thing about the whole debacle of Cecil's death to me is the fact that our Machiavellian Minnesotan dentist failed to kill Cecil outright with his bow and arrow and instead the poor lion had to wander around the fast-disappearing jungle for a further 40 hours before said dentist and his guides found him and put him out of his misery with a bullet.
But perhaps why I have been thinking so much about this beautiful, now sadly departed, beast is that the reaction to his violent, and yet oh so slow, death unfortunately epitomizes the way in which we are all, once in a while, forced out of our ostrich-like modus operandi of dealing with the enormity of just existing on this planet and made to focus on the horror of what we have allowed to take place: Cecil is a martyr. An unwilling one, of course. He did not seek death as a form of protest. He was indeed lured from the safety of the Hwange National Park by the smell of a rotting carcass of an animal further down the food chain than himself, but he did not in any way see this as a political act.
Cecil was much beloved and even said to be comfortable with humans. He would let them come close and shoot him. (With cameras I mean.) He had a collar placed around his neck by a team of scientists from Oxford University who were tracking his every move and building up a profile of what life is like for, well, let's face it, a celebrity lion.
Yes, Cecil was a star even before his death catapulted him from lion to myth. He had a name, for instance. Lions don't normally have names. And he had a social media presence – very convenient for helping to assure his legend status as we can all hop onto Youtube and witness him in happier times should we waver from our mantra of 'never again.' Yes, like many before him, Cecil will have more power in death than he could ever have achieved in life, no matter how many cubs he spawned or tourists he beguiled. Cecil has transcended being a mere lion in the jungle of Zimbabwe. He has become the Princess Diana of lions. It's true. He is the hunted, media-friendly beauty and the dentist is the paparazzi. Just as we love Princess Diana as much for her Greek tragedy-like death as we do for her giddy swan-like elevation to Goddess in life, so we are deifying Cecil even though, unlike Diana, we'd never heard of him a couple of weeks ago.
And I think this is all great. I really do. We should deify this poor beleaguered, majestic creature.
But I just would like to put it out there that I think it would be a healthy sign of our society if we already had strong opinions about the moral and ethical issues surrounding the (tenuous) legality of killing endangered species – and indeed even species that are thriving – without the need for some form of celebrity intervention to galvanize us out of our inertia.
I see a bit of myself in Cecil. I'm cute. I'm famous. If I were gaybashed to death would that engender a whole new wave of anti-homophobic vigilance? Probably. And that would be great.
I just wish I wouldn't have to die for the decent thing to be done. Just in the same way that I wish we had worked out our opinions about commercial corruption of a third world country and the casual sadism of big game hunting long before we had ever laid eyes on dear departed Cecil.