There are a lot of unanswered – possibly unanswerable – questions in the air at the moment. Questions such as what prompts a husband to drug his wife and, for a decade, invite strange men over to his house to rape her while she lies unconscious in the marital bed? Or: what kind of a person do you have to be to hang around with a convicted child sexual offender and billionaire who is exercising his perversions in plain sight, even if you are not yourself fully involved with said perversions? Or: if a year into a presidency you already have citizens being killed in the street by uniformed thugs barely a notch above a militia, what happens next?
It’s almost a relief to have to turn away and consider for a moment an older, slightly smaller question; namely, what makes someone want to kill an animal for sport? Not for food, not in defence of a home or family or livestock, just for fun. Just to be able to say they did it and take a picture with the corpse to prove it.
It becomes even more unfathomable (although yes, of course, the principle remains the same) when the way to killing has to be paved by guides and other hunters – because you don’t even have the skills to find and stalk animals yourself. Added to that is the fact that as a hunter aims higher and higher up the food chain, the more rare and precious the beasts become.
So, then, to Cecil: The Lion and the Dentist, which focuses on the killing in 2015 of a lion from Hwange National park in Zimbabwe by an American trophy hunter called Dr Walter Palmer. The documentary uses it as a prism through which to examine the interdependence of native Zimbabweans, the hunting and safari industry catering largely for rich, white tourists, and the national parks which seek to protect African wildlife while being forced to sacrifice some of it to the national economy.
Cecil had become famous for being – even for a lion – phenomenally majestic and beautiful. He was huge, the head of two prides, and was still a force to be reckoned with at the advanced age of 12. He was one of the animals being tracked by a team from Oxford University that was studying the animals in Hwange in part so that sustainable annual quotas for hunters could be decided. In June 2015, one of the team’s leaders noticed that data from Cecil’s collar was no longer being recorded. A few days later, they found his skinned and headless body. Piecing together the story from local guides, it appeared that Cecil had crossed the park boundary into a hunting area and been shot by Palmer, who had been brought out there by local professional hunter Theo Bronkhurst. Between the killing and the body’s discovery, Palmer had returned to the US.
There was no quota for lion hunting in the area that year. Too many had been killed too young the year before and the population needed to recover. Palmer claimed he was reliant on local knowledge, and Bronkhurst was arrested, but charges against him and the owner of the land on which Cecil was killed were eventually dismissed. The world’s media got hold of the story, however, and there was widespread outrage about the animal’s death and the perceived guilt of Palmer.
The film retells this aspect of the tale clearly. But when it tries to look at the bigger picture, it becomes frustratingly fragmented and superficial. It mentions the original displacement in 1928 of the ancestral tribes, who hunted but lived in balance with the local flora and fauna, to facilitate the establishment of Hwange national park, but doesn’t explain the reasons – and there must have been reasons, good or bad – behind it. It touches on the lack of transparency about how the money raised from hunting is distributed: some is supposed to go to nearby communities whenever an animal is “taken”, but it rarely does, which makes you wonder why this should be, whose fault it is and where any potential corruption lies. There is no interrogation of whether there are animal populations that genuinely need to be controlled and thus whether it would be foolish to look a lucrative gift carcass in the mouth. Are westerners too sentimental about animals (and should the unhinged nature of some of the protesters outside Palmer’s office affect our opinion of his actions)? Or are those who live alongside them too blase about a resource that is precious beyond the merely financial sense? And there’s an odd final comment that seems to conflate the hunting with the photographic industry that also does very well out of African safaris – but can it really be as bad?
A good documentary should, of course, raise questions. But not this many more than it answers.
Cecil: The Lion and the Dentist is available on Channel 4