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Interspecies Thrill Killing
Remembrance and Appreciation of Cecil the Lion
I was fortunate to get paid for writing my opinions for a good long time, but it was only after getting hired by Indian Country Media Network that I had no editors objecting to my biases. We all have them, and in my first career as a trial court judge I took my duty to be accounting for my biases rather than pretending I had none. On Medium, I do not have to pass an editor to publish, so if my biases get punished, it will be my readers wielding the stick.
In July of 2015, I kicked over a hornet’s nest of disagreement when I added my opinion to a chorus of disapproval over the killing of a lion named Cecil by Dr. Walter Palmer of Bloomington, Minnesota, an American dentist and self-described “big game hunter.”
I didn’t say “taking.” Killing is the right word. Unless you believe human animals are innately superior to all other animals such that other animals have no rights humans are bound to respect, killing is the ultimate trespass on the rights of others and it requires justification.
In the kind of killing we are about to discuss, the victims you hear about as individuals are always anthropomorphized to some degree, starting with having names. Animal shelters understand names to be important, and so animals up for adoption get “shelter names,” which may or may not go home…
