The Lion Does Not Sleep Tonight: a Modest Proposal to Stop Big Game Hunting?
A few years ago, I was on a plane about to take off from New York, headed to my home state of Minnesota, on the way to visit my family. I sat staring out the window as the baggage handler vehicles on the tarmac pulled away from the aircraft and the flight attendants rushed about, veering ever closer to the gaping jet-way door, as final boarding and seating announcements were made. I kept glancing at the seat next to me, which remained empty. I was hoping that it would stay that way: I had a book to read and some writing to do. I wanted a little peace, no interruptions.
But (alas!) just at the moment when the flight attendants were saluting the ground crew in the jetway and preparing to seal the door - a very late passenger launched himself onto the plane and (of course) landed in the seat next to me. This man was aggressively tanned, dressed in a casual yet showy way -- what I remember thinking that he must see himself as "GQ bush style" -- but he looked to me a bit more like Elmer Fudd. I looked away as he shoved a heavy-looking canvas bag into the overhead bin above us. Then he sat down again and turned to me and began to talk. He did not stop talking through the entire two hour & change flight to the MSP airport.
He told me that he was on his way home to Minnesota from Africa, where he'd been "on safari" -- and added that he was a member of "Safari Club International." I began to perk up. If you've been a tourist in Africa on photo-safari (as I had been with my late husband and my daughter some years earlier) conversation with a like-minded traveler seems somehow more achievable.
We were now airborne and leveling off -- and as the flight attendant began serving drinks, I cheerfully accepted my glass of chardonnay and was not alarmed as my fellow tourist lined up a couple drinks on his tray. Again, I knew that re-living African travel becomes a kind of genre of its own. Apart from Hemingway and the more inviting (and certainly less blood-lusty) Danish writer Isak Dinesen ("I know a song of Africa") whose haunting short stories were the basis for the film Out of Africa -- it seemed that we possibly had recollections to share, if only in brief conversation. I thought of trotting out a few slide-show-ish anecdotes of traveling to Kenya with my daughter and late husband, years earlier. After checking out Isak Dineson's house in Nairobi, we'd boarded a pop-top safari van to Masai country and the Serengetti. As I began to reminisce, my fellow-passenger stopped me, mid-sentence.
"I go there to hunt big game," he said.
He then launched into a description of searching out and killing "trophy" animals in Africa. He boasted that he had enthusiastically shot or killed many "big cats" on many occasions. Apparently, "Safari Club International" meant something far different than my assumption. He explained that this innocuous-sounding title was where would-be big game hunters paid significant amounts of money for the experience of hunting and ending the lives of exotic living creatures -- tigers, lions, polar bears -- ultimately mounting their severed heads. His defense was that "herds were culled," that this initiative was environmentally sound -- and finally that the enormous amounts of money required to hunt in this manner went on to fund conservation causes in Africa.
We began to argue, loudly, as I recall. I brought up "canned hunts," the lack of fair "sport," shooting fish in a barrel, cowardly Cheney-hunts. I demanded to know why this protection of a rich predator class from any accountability was allowed to continue, when animals were endangered and offspring orphaned, their parents victims of poaching, (as per his type of hunting). I was arguing against the wind. My seat-mate moved on to what he clearly thought was a poetic take on butchery: "celebrating the beast" -- insisting that the dead animals were immortalized in death, becoming "emblems" -- meaning that their heads were mounted and raised to set watch over the vanity-driven lives of their killers.
I don't know if my fellow passenger was The World's Most Reviled Trophy Hunter, Walter Palmer. Perhaps he was, because I cannot imagine that there can be that many creepy, rolling-in-dough Minnesotans without a conscience.
The maybe or maybe not Walter sitting next to me was also a Big Gun proponent. Walter Palmer killed the great lion Cecil by shooting him with a bow & arrow and allowing him, horrifyingly, to bleed to death over many hours. My seat-mate was eager to describe his equally-over-the-top "hardware" to me -- from this mega-guns stashed under the plane in cargo -- to the rifles with infra-red sights in the bag shoved into the overhead compartment. (Thank heaven this airline, which I will not name, has decided to stop carrying the weapons and spoils of big game hunting. A little late, but still necessary.) For me -- this ghastly eagerness to show off weapons reminded me of my own limited experience with hunting in Minnesota, but on a far different scale -- an image of finding, as a child, a pile of dead mallards on the family porch: the result of my father and brothers' weekend sport -- reminding me that an inevitable part of hunting was to "show the kill." Yet if this desire to hold up dead prey and be photographed is an inevitable part of hunting and fishing - with the Walter-types, we were into an area of "degree" so vastly different, with men so desperately eager to show an ugly "superiority" over nature, that it spun off into criminal narcissism.
The argument in the air went on, but I realized at last how I might end it. I remembered that when my husband and daughter and I were visiting the great animal conservation parks in Kenya -- we talked to one of the park rangers there. We asked him about poaching, about killing for profit, about the orphaned offspring of animals we'd seen all over Kenya. The ranger smiled at us and looked out at the herds of animals roaming all the way to the horizon. "You know" he said, "sometimes they get what they deserve."
I repeated the ranger's story to the "might have been Walter Palmer, Great White Hunter" next to me, as we descended for our landing. Here's how the ranger told it: he said that often when poachers or illegal hunters are caught & arrested -- they go to court in Nairobi, but because the justice system is corrupt, they often bribe their way to freedom and show up to kill again. This ranger said that sometimes (confidentially) he and his colleagues took justice into their own hands. They arrested the poachers, the Great White Hunters, the violators -- and they took away their weapons. But instead of taking them to court, they detained them until the sun went down. At sunset, they brought the Great Trophy Hunters deep into the parks, pushed them out of the vans and left them, with no weapons, to fend for themselves all night. "Then" said the ranger, "we come back in the morning to collect the bones."
I related this cautionary tale to the hunter at my side. "You see, when the playing field is leveled -- your side doesn't win" I said.
He smiled at me and took another sip of his drink.
"I don't see your point" he said. "They'd have to catch me first."
-- Carol Muske-Dukes