Emphasizing that we must not let our desire for revenge turn us into beasts as well, animal rights activists are calling for fair treatment for the individual who killed Cecil, Zimbabwe’s beloved lion, asking that the American hunter be punished in the most imaginatively painful way possible.
“Let’s not lose our minds over this senseless killing,” said African Wildlife Alliance president Andri Moolman “The culprit deserves nothing more than what is prescribed by law, which I can only assume includes stripping him naked, dousing him in the blood of a freshly killed antelope, and throwing him into a den of hungry lionesses.”
The appeal for sensible brutality was echoed by grassroots activists across the globe.
“I am personally opposed to the needless suffering of any of God’s beautiful living creatures,” said Tracy Lee Goodwin, an animal lover from Boulder, Colorado. “Which is why we need to brutally punish this fucking monster who cut off poor Cecil’s noble head. Set fire to his house. Once he’s broken his legs after leaping from a third-story window to escape the smoke, we’ll beat him to death. I’ll bring the tire irons.”
London fashion blogger and anti-fur activist Devon Aickers — who went with his family on a safari in South Africa in 2009 — says that lions these days are peaceful creatures and he can’t imagine why anyone would find it exhilarating to hunt one.
“Cecil was a very enlightened carnivore, from what I’ve read,” Aickers said. “Although he was a lion, he was very civilized, and during his whole life he fought his base urges to maim and kill in the name of sport and nourishment. He would have never thought about savagely tearing off the head and skin of a human.”
“There’s only one way to honor Cecil and the love for which he stood,” he added, “and that’s to search our collective soul for the rage that drives people to form mobs of mad vigilantes to kill deviants in the cruelest and more degrading manner possible, which in this case would be chopping up this hunter fellow into little pieces and selling them on eBay. That’s just one idea, actually.”
According to park records, Cecil had recently converted to Buddhism and was a devout pacifist. He often talked about his dream of becoming Gandhi of the savanna, saying he wanted to “put an end to the endemic savagery of the animal kingdom.”