Poor Walter Palmer – I bet he wished he’d stayed home in Minneapolis and left Cecil the Lion alone, because now he’s officially the Worst Person on Earth and there are grown humans outside his workplace dressed as animals.
As the Guardian reports:
Protesters placed animal toys outside Palmer’s River Duff dental practice in Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis. The practice was forced to close as protesters staged a recreation of the hunt involving cuddly toys and water pistols.
Personally I don’t understand why anyone would want to shoot a lion, but there are lots of things people do which I can’t comprehend, but which I don’t really consider my business. Magnificent though lions appear, 100 million years of evolutionary separation has limited the extent to which I can really empathise with Cecil and its hopes and dreams, its loves and fears. And the things that do anger me, for example when violent criminals are allowed to wander free to kill innocent people, are considered a bit déclassé in the drawing room of public discourse.
What Palmer did would have been unremarkable 30 or 40 years ago, but the rules of what is socially acceptable can change quite rapidly, and do so rapidly now that moral change is speeding up. Consider things like children outside wedlock, drink driving, smoking around kids, same-sex relations, all of which have transformed in either direction, at rapid speed; when social media allows deviants to be publically shamed, threatened and vilified, the process accelerates further.
Never mind the economic and conservationist arguments for big game hunting, of which there are many: no one will want to go through what this American dentist has endured, and so it will cease to exist, or it will continue only as a hidden activity (which, as it seems to be a fair bit about trophies, seems a bit pointless).
Maybe this is a good thing; the general improvement in our treatment of animals should be applauded, and public shaming does have its uses, but the anger directed at Walter Palmer shows how this can easily accelerate into something really nasty. I do hope anyone who made genuine threats against the dentist is prosecuted, and that some of the celebs who joined the bandwagon are a bit more wary next time (Professor Dawkins, who has a instinctive Dissenter’s horror of the mob, has already said something to this effect).
Mr Palmer has now hired a PR agency to deal with the disaster, which will be some task; normally the easiest way to get out of these problems is to trawl through your critic’s correspondence to find proof of racism, although this may be difficult with Cecil (he was named after Cecil Rhodes, but I’m not sure that will wash).
Saying that the internet has made us a global village is not an original observation, but when people do remark on it few focus on the downside; that is we are more prone to the intolerance of village life. People in one country have to watch out for the religious sensitivities of those half-way across the globe, for fear that a cartoon or low-budget film could lead to mob riots, whereas a generation ago the one might not have been aware of the other. Now anyone who engages in activities disliked by the mob – and away from a cold, rational discussion on whether it is ethical – can find their entire lives destroyed.
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