Martha Rosenberg | SPECIAL REPORT
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his week the nation is seething over the murder of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park by an American dentist named Walter James Palmer. Palmer used bait to lure Cecil out of the park, then shot him with a bow and arrow mortally wounding him. Hunters found Cecil later, still alive and killed and beheaded him. Palmer paid $55,000 for his macho privilege.
Palmers’ bloodlust is just the latest exercise in expensive animal sadism to hit the news. Last year a woman posing with a lion she killed provoked internet outrage. In 2012 the King of Spain enjoyed killing an elephant (to the horror of his subjects) and the year before CEO of Godaddy.com Bob Parsons videotaped his murder of an elephant. Nice.
The King of Spain (below) and CEO of Go Daddy Proudly Killed Elephants.
In 2006, Country and Western musician Troy Lee Gentry killed a penned pet bear named Cubby on videotape to appear the tough guy. Music critic Peter Grumbine asked if Cubby had “rolled on his back expecting his usual belly rub that followed his afternoon nap” before the killing. Others called Gentry a “sad pantywaist” who “shoots caged animals.”
Some try to defend trophy hunting, canned hunting and killing exotic animals as producing money that goes to the conservation of other animals–but most (including hunters who eat what they kill) think it is sick, sick, sick.
There are some laws against the warped acts of big game hunters like Palmer, but groups like Safari Club International (SCI) still flourish. And some of the world’s top leaders are members.
Few realize that President George H.W. Bush, former Vice President Dan Quayle and the late Retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. were proud members of SCI and pleaded with the Botswana government to keep trophy lion hunts available, for trophy hunters like them. There were reports of lions that Bush and Quayle personally killed in Africa but they remain unconfirmed.
Safari Club International (check out their “proud” Facebook den at https://www.facebook.com/safariclubinternational) offers a “Bears of the World” award, a kind of National Geographic for the bloodthirsty, in which hunters have to kill four of the world’s eight bear species which include imperiled polar bears. In 2006, SCI defeated an amendment to the Marine Mammal Protection Act in the House of Representatives that would have banned the import of sport-hunted polar bear trophies from Canada.
In an attempt to humanize its image, SCI has run programs like Sportsmen Against Hunger and Sportsmen Against Cancer hoping someone will eat the meat the “hunters” don’t want.
Safari Club International also has Disabled Hunter, Sensory Safari and Safari Wish programs to extend the fun of killing to the disadvantaged. On it web site, SCI showed how the Safari Wish program enabled a spina bifida patient to kill a young doe from his wheelchair at a Florida hunt club. The young man missed two hogs eating at the feeder but succeeded in shooting a greyhound-sized doe because “the Hunt Club suspended the deer harvest rules for his hunt” SCI wrote breathlessly. Did someone hold the deer for him while he shot it as is done with blind “sportsmen”?
At the risk of stating the obvious, this type of “sport” or “hunting” is mental illness.
(Article changed on July 28, 2015 at 21:11)
[box type=”bio”] Martha Rosenberg is an award-winning investigative public health reporter who covers the food, drug and gun industries. Her first book, Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health, is distributed by Random[/box]
FACT TO REMEMBER:
IF THE WESTERN MEDIA HAD ITS PRIORITIES IN ORDER AND ACTUALLY INFORMED, EDUCATED AND UPLIFTED THE MASSES INSTEAD OF SHILLING FOR A GLOBAL EMPIRE OF ENDLESS WARS, OUTRAGEOUS ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, AND DEEPENING DEVASTATION OF NATURE AND THE ANIMAL WORLD, HORRORS LIKE THESE WOULD HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED MANY YEARS, PERHAPS DECADES AGO. EVERY SINGLE DAY SOCIAL BACKWARDNESS COLLECTS ITS OWN INNUMERABLE VICTIMS.
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At last mass media catches up on this with what The Greanville Post and other voices have been urgently telling us. Let’s keep on them to see that this is a systemic, ongoing outrage, and not just one sensationalist incident.
God should have thought twice before he created man and woman (and in his own image; does that mean with the same character traits ?). Obviously the guy is not infallible and did not realize what he set loose on the world. By the way Rosenberg displays a very red lipstick, probably not knowing what horrible atrocities the make-up industry uses on animals (rabbits) to research the side effects of smearing colored waxes on one’s skin.
Good points Mr. Rochard. God’s underachievements are indeed quite clear in his creation, not only human “nature,” but the whole mess s/he created, especially the bloody food chain between carnivores and herbivores.
Regarding Ms Rosenberg’s lipstick, I’d say please give it a rest. Let’s keep the eye on the larger issue, that here’s a capable, terribly intelligent journalist making a contribution we can all benefit from. Why piss her off with something so picayune?
I’m sure we are all full of contradictions.
Not so picayune that question of lipstick. Lipstick is neutral as a decoration like Palin demonstrated. It is the use of it that matters as well how it is produced. But if the production harms sentient beings there is little difference between casually killing a lion and using a product that is tested by horrid cruelty. I would gladly piss off a terribly intelligent person that is so unaware !