And still we're talking about Cecil the Lion. A search for his name on Huffington Post yields more than 10 pages of results -- and that's just from the last 24 hours. The conversation now encompasses every conceivable shade of indignation about an impressive range of subjects that have nothing to do with lions. The latest indignation seems to be center on all of this indignation: as of this minute, the most-emailed article on The New York Times is an op-ed with the ridiculous headline, "In Zimbabwe, We Don't Cry For Lions," in which a Ph.D. student named Goodwell Nzou wonders "why Americans care more about African animals than African people."
Do we, now? That would be interesting if true. I have spent the last 12 years studying, writing, and teaching about African animals, and my impression is that most people are equally superficial in their caring about both humans and wildlife.
Cecil is not a lion, he's an internet meme, and people care about internet memes. If people cared about lions, then the one that got shot by the Minnesotan dentist in Zimbabwe would never have made the news, because the news would have been so old. People have been killing lions for as long as there have been people -- literally. And we are still killing heaps and heaps of lions every year, many of them in far more grotesque ways and with more far-reaching ecological impacts than what we did Cecil.
Remember the 60 Minutes piece on Furadan poisoning in Kenya that aired back in 2009? No? That one was a bit of a PR headache for FMC Corporation, purveyors of "agricultural solutions" used to produce the food you eat, and they made a few changes. But unlike Walter Palmer DDS, FMC Corporation was not forced into hiding, and as far as I know, its garage was not vandalized. (FMC stock is up more than 100 percent since 2009.)
Everything that needed saying about Cecil in relation to the global plight of Panthera leo was said by Laurence Frank, in his own letter to The New York Times. The Cecil meme is a brief flash in a random corner of the deep pan of lion conservation. People will talk about it for a little while longer, and then they won't.
Or perhaps I'm wrong about that. Perhaps Cecil is a turning point in the long and unhappy history of human-lion interrelations -- the Lusitania, the Pearl Harbor, the Surgeon General's Report. What would that look like?
There are a whole bunch of things you could do if you really do care about lions. The best thing you could do is go see one in the wild. This is admittedly an option available only to the economically privileged, although for them it is easier than you might imagine.
If that's not an option, you could go see one in a zoo. Whatever you might think about zoos, most of them are crucial supporters of wildlife conservation projects worldwide, and they foster the kind of empathic connections between humans and animals that we need if wild lions are going to last another 100 years. Just one zoo in Boise, Idaho, did more last year to support the existence of wild lions than all of the millions of hot words blown onto the internet about Cecil during the last week.
Or you could tithe your spare change (or your spare time) to any of the hundreds of conservation organizations, practitioners and researchers -- both international and locally grown in countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, C.A.R., Cameroon, Zambia, and, yes, Zimbabwe -- dedicated to the conservation of lions and lion habitat. Those folks work really, really hard, and they do not have the resources they need. Their trucks are breaking down and need to be fixed, and they need money for gas and to buy boots to stand on the ground to mediate the conflicts that are constantly cropping up between the lions over here and the people over there.
Or you could read a book about lions. Better yet, you could read your kids a book about lions. Or you could watch a documentary about lions. Or you could mail a letter to your congresspersons: ask them to support international conservation activities by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and basic biological research. Or you could hold a bake sale and donate the proceeds. Or you could chaperon a grade-school field trip to a natural area. Of you could do some research into the companies that make the products that you consume reward the ones that are doing good, and punish the ones that are doing bad. Or you could find ways to support our North American lion, Puma concolor, which according to Goodwell Nzou is what earns you the moral authority to give a shit about African lions.
Or you could even just make a concrete plan to do any of these things, all of which would help a lot more than your even your most heartfelt tweets and garage graffiti.