A Zimboo-bee Zombie Speaks: GOODWELL HUNTING

I read an interesting, ultimately disappointing "editorial" in the New York Times today.

The provocative headline was "IN ZIMBABWE, WE DON'T CRY FOR LIONS."

It was written by a guy in North Carolina, an African immigrant with the usual funny name (Goodwell Nzou). He is a "doctoral student in molecular and cellular biosciences at Wake Forest University."

Since he's therefore smarter than the average white person, AND grew up in Zimbabwe, he should be exactly the person to hip us on why Cecil the Lion doesn't matter, and why we should be glad he's dead.

You take it, Zimmy:

Did Cecil live near your place in Zimbabwe?

One lion fewer to menace families like mine.

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.

When I was 9 years old, a solitary lion prowled villages near my home. After it killed a few chickens, some goats and finally a cow, we were warned to walk to school in groups and stop playing outside. My sisters no longer went alone to the river to collect water or wash dishes; my mother waited for my father and older brothers, armed with machetes, axes and spears, to escort her into the bush to collect firewood.

A week later, my mother gathered me with nine of my siblings to explain that her uncle had been attacked but escaped with nothing more than an injured leg. The lion sucked the life out of the village: No one socialized by fires at night; no one dared stroll over to a neighbor’s homestead.

When the lion was finally killed, no one cared whether its murderer was a local person or a white trophy hunter, whether it was poached or killed legally. We danced and sang about the vanquishing of the fearsome beast and our escape from serious harm.

Recently, a 14-year-old boy in a village not far from mine wasn’t so lucky. Sleeping in his family’s fields, as villagers do to protect crops from the hippos, buffalo and elephants that trample them, he was mauled by a lion and died.

The killing of Cecil hasn’t garnered much more sympathy from urban Zimbabweans, although they live with no such danger. Few have ever seen a lion, since game drives are a luxury residents of a country with an average monthly income below $150 cannot afford.

Don’t misunderstand me: For Zimbabweans, wild animals have near-mystical significance. We belong to clans, and each clan claims an animal totem as its mythological ancestor. Mine is Nzou, elephant, and by tradition, I can’t eat elephant meat; it would be akin to eating a relative’s flesh. But our respect for these animals has never kept us from hunting them or allowing them to be hunted. (I’m familiar with dangerous animals; I lost my right leg to a snakebite when I was 11.)

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.

Don’t tell us what to do with our animals when you allowed your own mountain lions to be hunted to near extinction in the eastern United States. Don’t bemoan the clear-cutting of our forests when you turned yours into concrete jungles.

And please, don’t offer me condolences about Cecil unless you’re also willing to offer me condolences for villagers killed or left hungry by his brethren, by political violence, or by hunger.

* * * *

Nyah. So there, Whitey. You Americans, you destroy forests, you kill off mountain lions...and I will conveniently forget that you have Yellowstone National Park and hundreds of wildlife reserves, and that you also have fearsome buffalo and bison who are protected.

It's interesting to know what's going on in Zimboobie Land, but having a lot of poor people means you should consider birth control, not killing lions. Having a unique country with amazing wildlife should make you feel responsible to preserve it for the next generation.

No human should be cheering the unnecessary death of an animal of any kind, and that includes the fox in England, the alligator in Florida or the lion in Zimbabwe. A fucking thrill-kill dentist asshole pretending to be a "sportsman" can't be justified. No way.

The good thing about the Times piece is, as you'd expect, it was "fit to print." It had no "attitude," really. It was designed to present a point of view in a reasonable way, so you might agree with it. At the very least, you might learn something, which I did.

Bottom line? The article justifies killing animals. It justifies mankind being reckless. It pretends that man is the only important life form on the planet.

Where was this guy's answer to what the fuck to do about lions? Does he think they should all be rounded up and stuck in zoos so that blacks can continue overpopulating the Dark Continent? Does he think white hunter morons are the best way to provide income for blacks? Maybe he's like some assholes who think bees should all be killed because they sting people. And who cares if frogs disappear because they don't seem to have any importance.

I checked back on this Goodwell guy. He is a STUDENT. He's not a professor. But because he's black, grew up in Zimbabwe, and is taking courses on some obscure and fancy topic, that excuses him from the truth. The truth is he's a MILLENNIAL, and that means he has a tremendous sense of self, and all he's interested in is HIMSELF. That's why there was nothing about the big picture. Does he give a shit about ecology? Apparently not. It was just, "I lived where there were wild lions, so let's be happy to kill lions."

Contrast that with people who live in New Jersey or New York or Montana where there are wild bear. Bears are just as ferocious as lions. Nobody's saying, "Hooray, let's set bear traps and kill every bear." In fact, there are huge protests when "culling" takes place in areas where suburban homes have been built next to forests.

"Short sighted businessmen...nothing lasts for long," Joni once sang. Let's add short sighted academics living in their La-La land of tenure and pretty lawns on campus, and short sighted blacks who want to tell you that any thug with a gun or a knife "matters" and we should continue to ignore the moral issues of hunting and continue to turn our backs to ecology and climate.

I ended up coming away with an even stronger feeling that people are no good, and the more of them eaten by lions, shot by their fellow hunters, and dragged under the sea by sharks, the better.