I was originally asked to write this piece by The Spectator, but apparently I was a bit too late filing my copy – zoology professors and professional hunters are hard to round up at short notice – so here it is, unexpurgated and unimproved.
AFH
Photo courtesy of Slate – ©Andrew Loveridge/Wildlife Conservation Unit
Je ne suis pas Cecil… and neither was he
I never cease to be surprised either by the posturing courage or the sheer inhumanity of the expressions of ‘moral’ outrage on social media, but this recent furore over the death of the ageing Zimbabwean lion everyone knows as Cecil really has been quite special.
The complicity of the press is particularly grotesque. CNN went as far as to run a photo of the big cat with the caption, “Cecil the lion probably never knew how beloved he was,” surely winning some sort of prize for most redundant use of the modifier ‘probably’ in journalism.
He also certainly didn’t know he was called Cecil, a hilarious piece of nominal colonialism by British conservationists working in the country bloodily carved out of the Dark Continent by Cecil Rhodes and for almost a century called Southern Rhodesia in his questionable honour. (Rhodes is a distant relation of mine.)
I took this photo on January 23rd this year and put it on Facebook with the following caption:
“This lion is called ‘Bailey’ (wild animals should not be named) the only male lion at Colchester Zoo. He was born on June 27th, 2007 at Woburn Safari Park. His father, ‘Shane’, was born at Knowsley Safari Park in June 1997, and his mother, ‘Tamby’, was born at Woburn on October 13, 1998. All these lions are descended from those brought into the UK from Uganda by Jimmy Chipperfield, of Chipperfield’s Circus, to counter the inbreeding of British lions over the centuries.”
(Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison)
I myself fell under the aesthetic spell of lions aged nine –thirty years ago – in London and Colchester Zoos, joined and raised funds for the WWF from that point on, went up to Oxford to study Zoology under renowned Africa ecologist Dr. Malcolm Coe, and myself visited the Hwange Reserve almost twenty years ago where I followed the pride made up of the grandparents, and probably parents, of that lion, whom I photographed at the time.
Following the pride in the Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe in 1996 (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison)
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