NY Times: In Zimbabwe, We Don't Cry for Lions

Fantastic Op-Ed in the NYT, which deserved its own thread, by a Zimbabwe national about the Cecil "controversy." The piece is is here. Selected passages below:

Cecil who? I wondered. When I turned on the news and discovered that the messages were about a lion killed by an American dentist, the village boy inside me instinctively cheered: One lion fewer to menace families like mine.

My excitement was doused when I realized that the lion killer was being painted as the villain. I faced the starkest cultural contradiction I’d experienced during my five years studying in the United States.

Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being “beloved” or a “local favorite” was media hype? Did Jimmy Kimmel choke up because Cecil was murdered or because he confused him with Simba from “The Lion King”?

In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or granted an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror.

...

The American tendency to romanticize animals that have been given actual names and to jump onto a hashtag train has turned an ordinary situation — there were 800 lions legally killed over a decade by well-heeled foreigners who shelled out serious money to prove their prowess — into what seems to my Zimbabwean eyes an absurdist circus.

PETA is calling for the hunter to be hanged. Zimbabwean politicians are accusing the United States of staging Cecil’s killing as a “ploy” to make our country look bad. And Americans who can’t find Zimbabwe on a map are applauding the nation’s demand for the extradition of the dentist, unaware that a baby elephant was reportedly slaughtered for our president’s most recent birthday banquet.

We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.

I think this young man's intention is only to point out the hypocrisy of how there is very little uproar (or none) when innocent Zimbabwe children are savagely murdered by a local terrorist cell, when villages and citizens are starved by their own corrupt nationalistic government, or when their nation's ruler is presented with the brutal slaughtering of a baby elephant for his birthday. Only when something more accessible and "white-washed" presents itself to be framed as a sensational soundbyte or convenient hashtag do we see some kind of response.

With all due respect, I would put more stock in the words of someone who actually grew up living in Zimbabwe than anyone here in America. Including myself.

This makes about as much sense as trying to compare this to abortion.

In certain parts of China, they don't "cry for dogs" either. But that doesn't make it right either.

"We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people."


I wonder if they will be shaking their heads wondering where all the American Tourists are, when they've allowed all the endangered species to be killed, and no one wants to come to Zimbabwe, to take a ride through empty animal preserves?

Yes, seems "Someone" went crying to the mods.

Ok. A double standard, then. How's that?

xoxo