TOM THE DANCING BUG - Cecil the Lion Is Gone, Save Pumpkin the Rhino

[Read the post]

7 Likes

Love the “TM.”

And the white supremacist policing parallel, though Roxane Gay already had the best say on that: “I’m prsonally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care.”

6 Likes

Ehh, I prefer the take of an actual Zimbabwean, who notes that in the village where he comes from, no one likes living near lions (as it means living in fear), and they don’t mind lions being killed. Most people throughout the world are NIMBYs when it comes to megafauna; don’t want them near them, though most don’t want them to go extinct.

I guess that Goodwell isn’t a cute enough name for people to care about actual Africans instead of lions, though.

New York Times “In Zimbabwe, We Don’t Cry for Lions”

All of which goes right back to the good question of why so many white people in the U .S. care more about the deaths of African lions than those of African Americans.

5 Likes

Breaking News: Gizmo was shot.

But he had some kind of bullet-proof skin gizmo and it bounced right off.

1 Like

It’s possible to care about more than one thing at once.

Although if you had to pick just one, why didn’t you focus on the imminent destruction of all human life on Earth via climate change?

6 Likes

Africa’s a big, bloody continent; there’s plenty of room for people and megafauna. If you can have wolves in Yellowstone, you can have lions in Hwange National Park. And laws about people who lure lions out of the parks just so that they can deniably shoot them. That way both the commonsensical villagers and the bleeding-heart liberals in the cities can both be happy.

10 Likes

I, for one, propose free lion costumes.

1 Like

But if everybody’s a lion, no one will be

3 Likes

Climate change is too big for ape brains.

1 Like

What exactly is it that makes you think I picked just one?

2 Likes

They’ll just assume it was the name of the costume and mourn the passing of a perfectly good piece of kit.

Well you are correct that Africa is big and bloody. But wildlife habitat is on the decline for a number of reasons. And those pesky wolves refuse to obey the park boundary signs - that’s why the USFWS has a compensation program for ranchers outside of Yellowstone. I suspect lions are equally unable to stay within Hwange. Maybe villagers afraid of being killed by lions should be re-educated to fear Boco Haram, global oil barons, and Burger King.

1 Like

All of which has very little to do with a rich dentist shooting animals for “sport” (there are no air quotes big enough for this word in this context), bending the local laws to fracturing point to do it, and then lying his head off about it. He didn’t shoot the lion as a blow for villagers’ rights, he didn’t do it to stick one in the eye of NIMBYs who just don’t have the good sense to wreck the ecosystems of the world by killing all carnivorous megafauna everywhere, he did it because he’s a $PROCREATIVE_ORGAN.

4 Likes

Maybe the author could have been left for dead instead of saved when a snake bite made him lose his leg. Why can’t we be just happy nihilists?

I reckon Ruben could be onto a winner here… radio collars for all the endangered megafauna.

Monetise it by having the collars send a video feed; see what your adopted baboon got up to today…

Hopefully not shot.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.