Animals can be killed, but the term “murder” is specific to human beings.
ISIS commits mass murder in the most horrendous ways possible. Ethnic cleansing of ancient Christian communities and the destruction of antiquities by ISIS goes unabated. Planned Parenthood is as a fetal organ factory where the technicians pick their way through babies, cracking skulls and jokes, and top officials haggling over pricing.
And the Left is bored, indifferent, incurious or, feeling one of its sacraments exposed, suppressing the information by any means necessary.
Yet when a lion is hunted and killed, the hunter is not only denounced, but threatened with death.
Whatever one’s feelings about hunting, use of the word “murder” is not only inappropriate but alarming enough that anyone who uses it much be directly challenged.
Anthropomorphizing animals does not raise their status, it lowers human beings and blurs the distinction between animals and humans.
I understand why the Left does it. It makes it easier to posit policies that define individuals by their utility, their usefulness to The Group.
This must be stopped.
Greetings:
Apparently, no one is holding economically contributing to President Mugabe’s Zimbabwean (white-ophobic) paradise against the dentist. Didn’t we used to boycott racist African regimes ???
Got into an interesting discussion where the group was wishing all sorts of things on the dentist, then going on to talk about how good deer tastes. I pointed out that deer cannot fight back, and was immediately piled upon.
“He should have known the rules!” (Well, that’s why he hired the local experts. Does the passenger in a limo become responsible for the driver violating a local traffic ordinance?)
“It was on a protected reserve!” (Well, actually, no it wasn’t. It was baited away from the reserve, ’tis true, but hunters use the same technique when hunting deer, bears, and even fish. They try and lure the prey into the cross hairs. Or onto the hook, in the case of fish.)
“He ought to be extradited, properly tried, then hung.” (I’d love to see whether a US court would even entertain an extradition request, since hunting Zimbabwean lions isn’t illegal in the US, any more than evading the US draft was illegal in Canada, since they didn’t have a draft, any more than the US has lions. However, it seems to be the Canadians who are all about extraditing him, while their courts are still refusing extradition for US murderers if the death penalty is a potential punishment.)
I confess to some surprise the lion was named in honor of Cecil Rhodes, for whom Zimbabwe’s somewhat more functional, though raaaaacist, predecessor nation was named.
Sufficiently provoked, a whitetail stag will stand on its hind legs and fuck you up.
I started wondering about this baiting thing. Is it natural for a mature and intelligent mammal to be so easily lured by some free meat. I doubt he was starving if he was the leader of his pride.
I think it happened but, wondering why he went for it. I have theory that he was often fed by tour guides and researchers and was used to handouts. If so, they are partly responsible for this.
Baiting is done because it works — and in some jurisdictions it’s outlawed for that same reason.
I don’t think it’s simply a matter of waving raw meat and hoping the animal comes running; baiters set up their baiting sites and do a lot of work to make them effective — which normally includes avoiding human habituation because wild animals will avoid sites they associate with humans. Even so any animal, having discovered that food can be found easily in a given spot, will tend to add that spot to its rounds.
Free food, etc., is how all those different kinds of domesticated livestock (including LIVs) got that way.
i think the near-universality of the impulse among social conservatives to parallel poor dead cecil with first world abortion angst is the very definition of epistemic closure
the truth is all the wee lil babies whose parts got bandied about were gonna be aborted anyways
we all know this, it’s sure as kilimanjaro rises like olympus above the serengeti
whereas Mr. Lion, who knows he might coulda hung in there a few more years
he was kinda long in the tooth though, so that’s by no means a certainty
Baiting was not legal in this case. Also, the dentist in question has been involved in some other shaky animal killings. He probably had some notion that what he was doing wasn’t exactly kosher. However, he was also mislead by the fake guides.
Not that I participated in the protest march against him (his practice is the the burbs of Mpls), and not that I’m against hunting in general. Without hunting the deer would breed wildly and many of them would starve during the harsh MN winters. Plus, venison is tasty.
At least he didn’t use a gun. If you’re gonna kill a thing beloved by and precious to sensitives, fer chrissake use the bow or, even better, a bread knife. Don’t fodder the fascists.
If the animal was lured out of a protected area then this is called poaching. If the guy poaching didn’t know then he’s more of an accessory like a fence who buys a stolen item from a thief on a “I know nussink” basis.
If Cecil had some kind of status as a community icon then he might have done the equivalent of destroying a historical heritage like when that doofus in Texas poisoned the Treaty Oak. Either way I think we might need to extradite the guy for a trial IF the country he offended has an actual justice system and not a shake-down machine or a conveyer belt to a public gibbet.
The treaty oak poisoner got a life sentience by the way. For killing a tree. Meanwhile free Mumia or whatever.
Apparently the people in Mugabestan are flabbergasted that we care more about some old lion than about all the people that get eaten by lions in Mugabestan.
Me, I’m not flabbergasted. As the yellow L.I.V. demonstrates, human life doesn’t matter to a certain kind of American that considers itself more equal than others.
And if you think Boxer didn’t wind up on Napoleon’s dinner table, think again.
One thing that will happen from this is that there will be fewer people from the richer nations booking hunting trips to Mugabestan which will means fewer jobs and less money for conservation there. Collateral damage.
The money will flow to other nations where this kind of thing is not expected to happen.
There is a forgotten lion in this too. The one that wasn’t killed by the dentist because he killed the one he did. There was going to be a lion killed anyway.
human life is my favorite followed by puppies then my third favorite is moo cows and after that right now I’m on a big passion fruit kick
>That was the trouble with those 19th century atheists: they believed that man after God would still have limits. They failed to understand that man’s need for power knew no limits and learned, too late, that like the Bill of Rights, it is in the “won’ts” that earthly freedom lives.
The people who in the videos merrily describe the prices they can obtain for this or that body part may one day be old and as helpless as the infants they have dismembered. And on that far day they may want water. On what grounds will they demand it? On what basis will they ask for care, love or compassion?
Perhaps the ultimate argument for the belief in God is the lesson, relentlessly taught through history, that we have no reason to expect mercy from men. Our sole hope, illogical as it may seem, is betting that God will have mercy on us, because after all, Planned Parenthood won’t.<
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2015/07/30/guilt-as-power/#more-44260
[…] Cecil the lion was not “murdered” [Darleen Click] | protein wisdom. […]
“Anthropomorphizing animals does not raise their status, it lowers human beings and blurs the distinction between animals and humans.”
Exactly. That despicable attitude is one of the paving stones in the path to genocide.
@Tkdkerry,
I was scrolling down to make the point expressed in your quote. Your quote is more articulate than I would have been.
When I wrote “life sentience” above that was an honest misspelling of sentence.
Oh yeah, as McGehee says above, don’t buy this harmless herbivore deer crap.
If a deer and you go into a pit under thunderdome rules the deer is the one coming out of the pit at the end. And deer knows this. Deer can be aggressive and territorial and just because they want don’t want to eat you doesn’t mean they’ll tolerate you or give you chance to back off. And if you feed them bread and run out they’ve been known to try and see and if they can knock some more out of you with their hooves.
Bingo. Even if they weren’t feeding it, they altered it’s behavior by acclimating it to the presence of people.
Which is the only way I can think of that one could get close enough to a lion to even attempt to bring it down with an arrow.
Shooting a lion with an arrow strikes me as a good way to blow a year’s income just to see your PH shoot your lion for you.
Hopefully before either of you is mauled by a very pissed off lion.
That’s just what Josef Mengele said.
If a deer and you go into a pit under thunderdome rules …
C’mon paleo. Can’t we all agree to get…
BEYOND THUNDERDOME!!!!????
(That’s a double cultural reference, BTW. Anyone get both of them?)
I remember the Mel Gibson movie, but I cheated and used Bing to look up the quote and it’s apparently from a game called Borderlands.
oh please Mr. Ernst don’t be such a daffodil
to this very day cadavers are absolutely essential to medical training and scientifical advancements
and I imagine it’ll be like this for many many moons
they already said by the way that the #1 entity what tries to get the fetal bits is the failshit government of the united states of failmerica
mostly I’m just disappointed the mcconnellwhore republicans aren’t trying to cut the spendings – they just wanna take them from PP and hand them to their own cronies
disappointed but not surprised
oh please Mr. Ernst don’t be such a daffodil
Translation: Wah! He called me on my ghoulishness! Wah!
Lets see, Mad Max movie from the 80’s that many felt did not fit in properly with the first two, and tried to sell us Tina Turner as a warlord.
Tina Turner song for the movie soundtrack
Mystery Science 3000 joke. (Post Joel)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEI_udV88i4
BTW Borderlands is memorable to me as a video game mostly because of the line spoken at Scooter’s Catch a Ride consoles:
” Hey! Name’s Scooter! I’s named after my sister. Hey, come get you some wheels!”
“Hey, Scooter says don’t walk, drive! My daddy always said wheels were better than heels. Uh, he was paralyzed, though. Anyway, don’t walk, drive!.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421836/cecil-lion-zimbabwe-internet-outrage
This is a good article that illustrates the difference between environmentalists and naturalists.
Yes, geoffb, I had made a comment in another group about the “other lion”. If I may anthropomorphize, the young lions in the park are high fiving over their new opportunity and celebrating that it was not one of them.
mcgehee, I understanding baiting, I just found it curious that this king Cecil was the cat easily lured and not just some other beta lion in the area.
Mystery Science 3000 joke. (Post Joel)
I congratulate you, paleo, for finding the MST3K ref and for perfectly setting up the scenario wherein I might provide that coveted punchline.
That’s a first for me; I now can die happy.
So if you’re Tom Servo and I’m Crow, who’s Mike with the oily rag in his mouth?
A man unable to speak intelligibly.
Not Joel like it should be.
Mike is good buddies with Lileks.
Make of that what you will.
I think Lileks is awesome, and Mike is a decent enough guy.
I just preferred the show when Joel was on the spaceship and Mike did various characters instead.
His Morrisey is a favorite of mine. “I cried, I cried, and then I died. Did I mention that I cried?”