If you ask me, the present situation where the world’s media are in a frenzy over the killing of Cecil the lion, who has been hailed by the media as the world’s most famous lion, is pretty damn pathetic.
Cecil the Lion was an old African lion, past his prime, and his death had little, if any, effect on the lion gene pool.
I am not going to buy into the hysteria promoted by the media, where even hosts of TV talk shows have appeared to break down in tears over the event. Nor will I try and attribute blame in a case where, thanks to the bias of the world’s media, it would be impossible to know the truth of the matter. However, I am going to fire off a quick comment about the obscene situation in which the media have taken up this matter, beating their chests, pulling their hair, crying crocodile tears and calling for all sorts of inhuman punishments for the alleged guilty parties.
Yet, at the same time as this media circus is being played out, five elephants were poached from Kenya’s Tsavo National Park and the world’s media have said virtually nothing about that event! I guess that if one of those elephants had been named Dumbo, we would have all heard about it. In addition, how many other poaching incidents have taken place at the same time, or recently that the media have ignored? Black rhinos are far more threatened, than are lions, but rhino poaching incidents also go unmentioned by the world’s media; yet they are happening all the time. Oh, that’s right, I just remembered that rhinos don’t have human names.
Even more important than these wildlife incidents, how many African people have been murdered by governments, terrorists or bandits in the same timeframe? How many African children have died of disease or starvation? How many other unspeakable horrors have been forced upon the people of Africa that the media has simply turned a blind eye to or given scant coverage to? Now these people do have names but I guess that they are just humans and are no where near as important as animal celebrities; at least not to the media, anyway.
But give an animal a silly human name and the fickle and self-serving media fall all over the story. How about a little perspective, some objective reporting and respect for the rest of the inhabitants of the African Continent, please?
(Oh, and the lion image above is just a generic photo of a lion. I could have left it to your imagination to believe that this was Cecil, just as most of the media articles have done, but it is not Cecil – I believe that this one’s name is Bruce!)
Here are some additional facts that are pertinent to the Cecil Saga:
On Facebook, one of Cecil’s lamenters was decrying the fact that, now that Cecil was dead, another lion would take over the pride and kill all of Cecil’s offspring. Instead of losing just one lion we might lose a dozen or more lions. Lions will do that; when a male takes over a pride, he will kill any of the cubs fathered by his predecessor, so that the lionesses will come into heat and he can then pass on his genes to the pride. Typically, a male lion will only hold the breeding rights, to a pride, for around 2 years before another male defeats him and takes over the pride.
However, Cecil was 13 years old and the prime reproductive years for lions are between the ages of 5 and 9. By age 8 they are often in decline, losing weight and mane hair and few will even survive past the age of 10 and Cecil did well to get to the age he did.
So, almost certainly, any of Cecil’s offspring would be mature adults by now and able to fend for themselves. So the claim that the killing of Cecil would be the killing of many more lions, is just more of the hot air that this event has generated.
To learn more about the truth behind the Cecil the Lion fiasco, you might like to read this article, too: Shame on the World.
Good article, thanks.