CECIL

How do you become one of the most hated person in America? Kill a beloved African lion, of course.

After killing a famed African lion named Cecil in Zimbabwe for $50,000, Walter Palmer, an American hunter slash dentist, went into hiding. In addition to being a local favorite, Cecil is tracked by Oxford University as a part of their study. Of course, due to the animal’s status and Palmer’s selfish behavior, Palmer received much backlash from animal lovers.

“I had no idea that the lion I took was a known, local favorite, was collared and part of a study until the end of the hunt,” He said in an email.

But in the end, Mr. Palmer, killing a lion is not right no matter what kind of status the animal live under. You are becoming the epitome of the greed of mankind. Is it genuinely worth it to spend that much money only to commit such a crime against nature in the end? Are you really so desperate to feel manly that you need to harm others?

While I don’t entirely condemn hunting due to the fact that it helps balance out specie populations and hunting is considered tradition for some cultures, “hunting for fun” and “hunting for sport” will never be okay. The only thing it does is make you sound like a dinosaur from Jurassic World, and I mean that in the worst way possible.

While talking about the cruelty Cecil faced, I realized that people often shift the topic to the one of police cruelty or how much more suffering soldiers have to endure in the war zone. However, I hope people can realize that there is a time a place for these topics, and this is not one of them. Though police brutality is cruel and the soldiers out on foreign fields are extremely brave, it’s not fair for the animal that we try to shift a topic about a lion’s death to our own specie when they do not get enough attention as it is. We are not the only ones living on this planet. It is extremely selfish of us to not be aware of our mistakes and the pain we inflict upon other living things.

All the love.