Big Game Shame
There has been a whole lot of talk going on in the world these days about the incident in Zimbabwe where a big game hunting doctor from Minnesota cold-bloodedly killed a lion so he could slice off its head and hang the head on the wall of his house so he could impress his friends. This statement needs to be repeated. This man MURDERED an animal in cold blood so he could chop off that animal’s head so he could impress other people. This man also may have killed the lion because he simply had a blood lust that caused him to psychologically get off on the thrill of killing living creatures.
This is what big game hunters do. They kill living creatures that are otherwise minding their own business and living normal lives inside of their environment. This doctor had killed animals before and hung them on his walls, and for this hunting trip, he had paid over $50,000 for the opportunity to get access to kill animals.
The reason this incident drew so much attention was that the lion that was killed had become a very popular lion for the people who live in the country of Zimbabwe and for many of the tourists who visited that country. How many countries have animals roaming in the wild that end up being so “people friendly” that this one had its own name? He was called Cecil The Lion. Cecil The Lion was murdered by a doctor in Minnesota so he could hang Cecil’s severed head on the wall of his house like a trophy.
And now, there are a whole bunch of people in an uproar. The murder of this innocent lion struck a chord deep in the consciousness of people throughout the world and now they want to string this doctor up. In this era of an online world, the people of the Internet have done the equivalent of forming a lynch mob. Many of these online people would love to do to that doctor what he did to the lion.
Perhaps the idea of murdering a hunter for murdering an innocent wild animal is going a little too far, but the idea of the legality of big game hunting of animals for their trophy value has GOT to come under scrutiny. And the concept of there being anything honorable, anything impressive about a person who kills animals for either their trophy value or for the thrill that it gives them needs to be halted immediately. It is a behavior that cannot be validated.
For that is the problem. People kill animals to show off as trophies because they think that it is impressing people. Or they kill because they have a blood lust similar to serial killers. Either way, they are a very small segment of our society that is disproportionately killing off important animals of the world eco-system. There are many animals that used to be a part of this world that are no longer an existing species, all because hunters have killed their species into extinction. This form of hunting provides NO value to this world. It HAS to stop.
Trophy hunters need to be totally ostracized in this society. If the world as a whole could treat these big game hunters as completely detestable creatures that live among us, they might be able to identify “their occupation” as the horrific human exercise that it really is. They terminate the lives of innocent creatures for their own selfish reasons. THAT has to stop.
As a concept, the practice of barbarically killing animals just for their trophy value will some day be as abhorrent as the practice of other such detestable actions as apartheid, slavery, torture and other forms of cruelty and murder. It is KILLING for the sake of KILLING.
People of conscience all over the world need to team up in an organized effort to publicly SHAME the trophy hunter out of existence. It needs to be considered as such a loathsome hobby that is so detested worldwide that it is turned into an exercise and a behavior that itself it is made to become EXTINCT.
If the people of the world can continue to galvanize their efforts against the idea that it is NOT okay to unnecessarily MURDER these innocent animals, the barbaric practice CAN be stopped. If it is stopped, then maybe, the death of Cecil The Lion might actually end up having some meaning.
