by Grania
Most of you will already know of this story, an American tourist hunted and killed a lion in Zimbabwe and is now being investigated because the lion he shot happened to be a beloved tourist attraction at Zimbabwe’s largest game reserve, Hwange National Park. Walter Palmer is now under investigation as this hunt was clearly not legal although he maintains that he thought it was. Inevitably in the Age of The Internet, he is also now the target of threats and abuse both online and in the “real” world. He may deserve no better, but mob justice is always going to end badly. Humanity knows this from countless lessons in history. It’s why we have courts and laws and lawyers. But we don’t always seem to remember our history, and more’s the pity.
I don’t really have much to say on the subject of trophy hunting. I think it is cruel and pointless. It is also both legal and big business in many countries in Africa, so canned hunting is not going to go away any time soon. Instead of targeting the rather tasteless individuals who make use of these hunting safari clubs, the internet’s time might be more usefully spent raising awareness about animal conservation or petitioning governments to put a stop to the this type of hunting.
All of this is an overly long preamble to a new angle I did not see coming.
Apparently Animal Communicators are a thing. Or at least, they think they are a thing.
The author doesn’t just talk to animals. She talks to dead animals, and – this is the clever bit – they talk back. For a fee, of course.
It is unclear what “Raise your vibration” means, but perhaps it is one of those things that is hard to translate from the original. His style is a little archaic, but then again, perhaps that is a fault of the dead-felid-to-live-human Translator Matrix.
Why do humans do this? Self-delusion, self-aggrandizement, cynical self-promotion; take your pick.
What! A dead African lion who can talk English.
Truly amazing.
Benefits of colonialism!
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that he sounds just like Karen Anderson, too.
Jesus and his followers all spoke English. The King’s (James I) English. To say nothing of Abraham. Moses, et al. I mean that is how we know exactly what our lord and savior wants from us.
NOW i’ve seen everything. good god, lemon.
I didn’t know that was a thing either. What Palmer may or may not deserve, his family and employees are unjustifiably being directly impacted by the actions of the mob. I saw a lot of comments saying “better off working elsewhere” regarding his employees, which the people saying likely have no way of substantiating, which speaks volumes about their rationale regarding their actions.
While I don’t have much time for this dentist just like everybody else, I’m equally appalled by those who think hunting him down and destroying his life, and the lives of everyone associated with him is OK. How is picketing his home with a sign saying “YOU SHOULD ROT IN HELL FOREVER” any better than big game hunting? It’s just like these forgiving religious types to come up with an eternal punishment. Yes, what he did is revolting – so is permanently destroying his life and (in their minds) death over it.
I don’t know whether its like this in the UK, but in the US animal abuse regularly gets a more vociferous public reaction than human abuse. The classic example being Michael Vick, the NFL, and the NFL’s lenient treatment of players who are actual murderers and rapists compared to their treatment of a player who was involved in dog fighting.
I’m not obtuse to your point, but the statement that the NFL has gone lenient on murderers and rapists, just isn’t accurate. Aaron Hernandez was released by the New England Patriots after his indictment and I know of no case of a convicted rapist getting easy treatment by the NFL. Their handling of the Ray rice situation, as is true to from for the Goodell era, was atrocious, but that doesn’t mean that the NFL looks the other way when something as serious a rape or murder occur.
I’m not impressed with the league’s ethics in any of these cases, they generally only act when it becomes a PR problem. That was certainly the case with Ray Rice. Doesn’t matter if it’s animal or spousal abuse.
It’s also the same with a number of college sports programs. But we’re getting off topic here.
My intent was not to defend the ethics of the NFL, I agree that they only act when they perceive a PR problem, I was merely pointing out that it’s not accurate to say that murderers and rapists are getting lenient treatment.
I think Cecil’s spirit animal is Deepak Chopra.
How to Talk to Animals with Karen Anderson
https://youtu.be/V-mBj3LQa-E
As always do not forget to skim the YT comments.
Suitably sappy music…
Dr Doolittle is her great-great-great grandfather.
I tried “picturing my message in my mind”, and all my living dogs said were “um, you gonna finish that sandwich?”
Every corny video transition in the toolbox.
My money is on self-promotion. Cynical, delusional, take your pick. For myself, I don’t want to talk with a dead lion who troubles himself from beyond the veil only to utter such drivel as “it is what it is.”
That was my thought as well. A psychic ambulance chaser…
I have no positive feelings about big game canned hunting. I have heard the argument that the large fees paid by a ‘hunter’ helps support wildlife parks and it supports people in poor areas. But so does eco-tourism — and the latter is far more sustainable.
The canned hunting in some places is financing the conservation efforts. In some places it also provides employment to locals who, otherwise, would be clearing key animal habitat for agriculture. In many places there are more of some species than the land can support sustainably. (Of course this is due to human interventions; but it is the case nevertheless. The African countryside has been more or less fully populated by humans for a very long time.)
The equation is not simple.
I am not a hunter; but have been surrounded by them my entire life. I find it hard to blanket condemn hunting, canned or otherwise.
In fact, I prefer the canned version because it may help preserve wild populations from hunting.
Obviously baiting an animal away from a preserve and killing it (one with a radio tracking collar no less!) is clearly wrong, full stop. How to assign the proportions of guilt amongst the guides, Palmer, and perhaps other locals or even preserve employees (who knows?) is probably quite difficult.
I wouldn’t blanket condemn hunting either. Even though I personally have no taste for it. I went deer hunting with some friends once when I was younger. I had learned rifle in a club on base (military dependent) and had achieved marksman 1st class standing, kneeling and prone. I love being outdoors and figuring out how to get close to animals. I was excited to take the shot. It was a near perfect shot. I felt really bad afterwards and never had a desire to do it again.
I think the benefits of canned hunting that you mentioned can be realized by other activities like eco-tourism, which I favor over the hunting. Yes, there are negatives with that too, but they are manageable. I think the hunting, even when legal, contributes to the demand for trophy hunting in general and that most of it is illegal. Sort of like buying exotic reptiles from a legal source, even one that breeds instead of harvests, contributes to creating the demand for them more generally, that results in illegal harvesting and trade and all the bad things that go along with that.
Well, sure. The equation isn’t simple.
There may be a problem with increasing trophy hunting (demand/pressure) by allowing it in a canned form. But I think it’s more likely to relieve that pressure on wild populations.
Tourism is good, if carefully controlled. Yes, encourage “good” tourism as much as possible.
I’m not a hunting promoter, at all. However, it seems to me people are going to do this. Making it illegal may well drive the price sky-high so as to make it irresistible to locals who will arrange poaching hunts. (I think some of this is going on now.)
The canned version may well avoid this.*
I don’t think trophy hunting is significant in the extinction of species (in the 20th century) compared to habitat destruction, poaching for magic (rhino horn, bear gall, etc.) or poaching for materials (ivory, skins, etc.).
CITES was a good step to prevent harm to threatened species.
For species where they are not threatened, some hunting may be fine (charge a high price, use the funds to preserve habitat and a range of species).
Some have noted that the death (of Cecil) was bad. Probably it was. Is dying of cancer, a parasite infestation, or an infection less cruel? (For a herbivore) is being snatched by a predator and disemboweled/dismembered while alive less cruel? I don’t know; but it’s not obvious to me.
* Where I live, there are numerous elk “farms”, pheasant “farms”, etc. where people go to shoot raised animals on private land. This too is not simple. Maybe it helps relieve pressure on wild populations. But maybe if the hunters were in the real wild, pursuing wild animals, they would vote in ways the helps preserve habitat (and not if they do the canned hunting). Maybe this spreads diseases such as CWD. Maybe escapes damage local wild populations. Maybe it produces pollution.
I’m sorry this unfortunate animal Cecil was shot by a gun, left for 40 hours, overnight to bleed, and then finished off the next morning with an arrow! That is absolute total torture! Then the lion was beheaded (obviously for the heads to be mounted) and skinned! His soul was totally ripped away from him! This is the most disastrous treatment of any animal ever! There is no other creature that exists on this planet, no matter how evil the creature may be, (poisonous) or otherwise, nothing deserved this! This is very sad, indeed! 🙁 🙁 🙁
Other way around: Shot with an arrow and then killed with a firearm.
Yes, the arrow first. As far as I can tell, the whole purpose of this hunt was so the dentist could claim a bow and arrow kill of a lion. So the expedition was a failure, and even from the hunter’s point of view, Cecil died in vain. He had a license to kill a lion, but from the reporting it is unclear whether this allowed a bow and arrow kill. [This dentist seems to be a prominent person in the bow hunting fraternity; holds the record for the longest range bow and arrow kill of a North American elk, or something like that.]
Yeah, he’s local to my area, and there’s a huge buzz about it here.
He had bagged a lion some years ago in another hunt. I do not know if he knew that this time the lion was illegally lured from a protected area, but normally the paying client does not know a lot of details behind the hunt. They pretty much trust in the hired professionals who tell him what to do.
So he shot Cecil with an arrow. That makes it even more dodgy. How could anyone get a clean kill of a big animal like a lion with an arrow? If this guy is such a big deal hunter let him try hunting something really dangerous, like a buffalo or a hippo… they’re not endangered…
cr
I presume you mean also, that those animals may wreak an interesting revenge on someone shooting them with a bow.
If not I then propose it.
A cage or arena match. Man on foot with bow facing up fair and square.
Hippos I gather can be fast and bity.
Interesting, but they are usually to cowardly for that.
yes the wreaking was definitely in my mind 😉
cr
You don’t get around on the internet much, do you? Sensibility is fine, but don’t overdo the sense part.
What if … when a hunter kills an animal … or an animal dies in great pain … that’s the only way they GET a soul? And then they are happy!!
So just believe that.
I am not sure you have ever seen a shark rip each limb, one at a time, off a sea turtle.
Actually Cecil was shot with a bow at close range. Had Cecil been truly dangerous to humans aside from being a lion we wouldn’t be bothering with looking for the dentist who shot him
We are soon to lose many of the large cats and other animals and it is all because of humans. Another fine legacy we can add to slavery or even religion. Very proud to be an American and better yet, an American dentist.
Heard one of his fellow idiots describing this as harvesting. Sounds much better than murder.
Yeah, you know people are on ethically shaky grounds when they start using euphemisms. “Slaughter” is the correct term for killing animals for food or sport.
First off- I don’t enjoy that this lion was killed. However, reading around a bit I’ve seen many conservationists support game hunting in specific situations. For example, the white rhino was almost extinct. No one really cared- it wasn’t from hunters, they were just dying off. There were no governments paying enough to keep them going- I sure as hell wasn’t donating money. However, the big game industry- one where rich people will pay lots of money to kill something (ideally with a single shot and no pain, but we all know that idea fails too often for it to be a great defense). That industry, which charged this dentist $50,000 to hunt, now had access to lots of cash which they used to protect, and breed, and significantly raise the white rhino numbers and prevent its extinction. This crude capitalist system is the only thing that was up to the task of gathering the resources and support an overall flourishing of this species. So, I guess it’s just a thought I’d like to hear some discussion on. I don’t want game hunting to be the solution to protecting species. But if there is not a successful one in place, is it wrong to exercise this method in the meantime? If a capitalist has a monetary interest in stocking and growing a population of healthy animals that until previously were on the brink of non-existence, there is a grey area here worth talking about. And the current solution in place may be a direct result of our combined disinterest before the fact.
I donno, according to Wikipedia, the white rhino was nearly extinct due to hunting, and the main threats now are habitat loss and hunting (in the form of poaching).
Much of it due to horn poaching for the Asian market, Taiwan and increasingly China for so called traditional medicine. A poacher can make three life times worth of money from a single rhino horn.
It’s worth so much money they use a team of people and a helicopter. They tranquilize the rhino then hack it’s horn off going deep into the poor animals face, then leave it to slowly die in horrific pain.
They hack into it’s face because the horn is so valuable, it’s value is measured in tenths of a gram so they want every bit they can get. It’s simply horrific and cruel, and completely senseless in that the horn is nothing but compressed hair and serves no actual medicinal purpose other than the placebo effect.
That’s a lot of money, pain and suffering for something that has no medical effect at all.
My comment on that video:
“P.T. Barnum is proud of you Ms. Anderson (I know, I just spoke with him)! Rock on! :)”
Must get in touch with all my deceased Dogs and Cats to see how they’re doing.lol
Its quite amazing the personality transformation that cats go through when they die, isn’t it? Who woulda thought that a territorial, harem-keeping, cub-killing carnivore would go all “love and appreciate all creatures” in the afterlife? Must be quite a place.
Felines talk to me too, mainly to inform when they are happy, annoyed, or hungry.
Apparently an extradation treaty exists between the US and Zimbabwe. The charge will likely not be for killing the lion but rather for bribery of park guards. Palmer is a wanted man in both countries and may be tried in either. Good luck Mr. Palmer.
According to current reports his whereabouts are unknown. It appears he has gone into hiding.
I wonder is she can have a word with my mum and dad while she’s about it. Much loved. Much missed.
I was wondering what Hili had to say about this. Could you ask her?
Sure, today only for the low, low price of $75 for a 15 minute session.
~Grania
I’d say that’s self-aggrandizement, but she deserves it.
Quick, call the dentist! The customers of this woman have a cavity where their brain should be.
Humans need to stop over breeding. Two or less children per family for four generations and in less than 100 years we will have fewer people.
Until then the lions just have to deal with the fact that our species is out of space.
Well, thanks for that truly uplifting video!
How is it that after 51 years on this earth, much of it spent as part of the skeptical community, I can still be shocked at what people will believe?
But…there it is.
On another forum someone arrived spouting the most incredible gibberish about how everyone misunderstand God, that God is a single particle that created all particles and we are all part of God and then things got weirder! As always, Poe’s Law was in effect, but eventually it became clear this person was serious, and a devotee of a guy channeling an Alien. Here’s a channeled message from the Alien, from the channeler’s website:
http://bashar.org/aboutmessagebashar.html
(You can see videos of his channeling on his website and youtube).
And an introduction to this guy from a skeptical website:
https://skeptoid.com/blog/2014/01/19/everything-you-need-to-know-about-paul-ankas-cousin-and-his-multi-dimensional-alien-friend/
The mind boggles that anyone could be sucked in by this guy, but interaction with a devotee indicated a person who really had no critical thinking skills whatsoever, so it became less surprising that he could believe
such things.
Web sites like WEIT are always nice to visit as Islands Of Sanity when one has spent time visiting the world of supernatural beliefs.
I’ve sometimes noticed a strange conflation between “critical thinking” and a “critical personality.” Someone with the latter is going to be negative: they like tearing people down, complaining, shaming, and blaming. Nothing is ever good enough; nobody is ever good enough. We all recognize the type category.
But then somehow skeptical analysis, doubt, and relevant questions regarding the truth of factual claims gets subsumed into this idea of not wanting to be or be around people who are “critical.” It’s the same word, see — and let’s only look at what’s on the surface. Reason is therefore seen as a sort of control you try to put on yourself, others, or reality. It’s the antithesis of being warm, accepting, supportive … and good. Faith-style good. You believe. You believe in yourself. You create the world you need.
It’s my personal impression that people who put this deepity into practice (“Don’t be critical!”) all seem rather needy. They appear to have either a tendency towards self-criticism and depression — or have a history of having been around some very mean jerks. The idea seems to be that by refusing to put nice, happy beliefs to the test you’re not being negative OR controlling. But of course nothing “empowers” a person to exert control on their environment so much as a belief that wishing makes it so – and critical thinking is the enemy, so shut up.
Indeed. The Bashar follower, predictably, engaged in just this sort of conflation.
Our skepticism was “being close minded” and “not giving these possibilities a chance”
and that was just a bad way for a person to be. “Why so negative?”
This reminds me of a similar attitude of religious people (which of course can’t be totally generalized). It’s easy to diagnose the negatives about religious belief including the worry, as Sam Harris has expressed it, of dogma, of intransigent beliefs, of the balkanisation into separate moral communities by faith. And certainly interfaith or sectarian (or faith vs secular) conflict can be attributed to this.
In fact, from the armchair, just given the concept of religious belief, one would most likely predict that religious faith would result in conflict.
But like so many things there’s a flip-side, and when I see people of different religions interact (in more moderate versions and societies) it seems evident that this “true for me” type thinking and “it’s my faith” can
result in a softening of aggression, and a form of acceptance.
At this point where religious has had to contend with the momentously successful and powerful claims to truth and influence that science has posed, and given the benefits of a non-sectarian/non-religious government structure, and given that people have been forced more than ever to interact with and live among people with alternate religious beliefs…the religion of the non-extremist can’t put forth the same claim to Absolute Truth or knowledge. Most people just have to acknowledge, even if implicitly, the relativity of their religious belief, and that it can’t be demonstrated as true in the way science can provide support for it’s claims.
So most (at least Western) religious people have fallen back into “ok, I can’t prove it, it’s my religious faith.”
So there is this peaceable, accepting quality that can, and often enough does, come along with the idea that religious belief is a “faith” that is ok to hold though can not be convincingly demonstrated to another person. Harris description of “faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.”
I often see religious people granting this not simply to the people of their own religion, but to other religions. So in that way there is a sort of conflict-resolving element to faith (as well as the flipside of conflict creation).
Obviously most of us here believe that, on balance, “faith” has more liabilities overall than it’s worth. But it’s useful to acknowledge the reality of how things actually play out in reality as somewhat messy for our predictions.
I agree, ecumenicism has its uses — and is preferable to resolving conflicting faiths through violence. But in privileging and protecting personal “truths” diplomats are too likely to forget that the “personal” aspect is going to be discarded by anyone who takes the belief seriously. And in the long run, they all do.
Despite all the surface rhetoric of peace, love, and harmony, I think Bashar and his (its?) followers would be downright dangerous if they succeeded in getting real power, or a real majority in society. Beliefs which ultimately rely on faith are forced to protect themselves through the use of any immunizing strategy which seems effective — and they’ve granted themselves the capacity to determine what’s right and wrong, or good and evil, according to any rules or facts they can make up.
Dr Doolittle?
I think you’re reading too much for not this. She probably just likes communicating with the spirits of dead animals. Is that so wrong :p
I very, very rarely post on my own website, but yesterday, FWIW, I posted what I believe would be a just punishment for Cecil’s killer, should he be found guilty. I haven’t found any other reasonable approach, so far. Prison would be a huge waste, and the death penalty would fix nothing, so I hope my idea reaches reasonable minds, if for no other reason than food for thought.
Cecil’s post-script, left off the post from the animal communicator: “Oh, and man, am I ever going to miss zebras. They tasted soooo good!”
well, I for one would dearly like to know what Sue the famous T-Rex has to say about the afterlife. or maybe we could have this woman contact an Anomalocaris or an Opabinia! Talking to dead pets is really a wasted opportunity when we could have her talk to famous fossils, find out what their true coloration was, if they did in fact have feathers, and what they used them for…just think of what a boon to science this wonderful lady could be!
I’ve mentioned stuff like that to friends who believe in people who talk to animals and/or the dead. Apparently I have the wrong attitude. The minute spirits feel skepticism and a ‘test’ coming on they shut right up.
And no, that’s not suspicious. Any sensitive person would feel the same way. They sure do, at least.
I tend to judge killing of animals (in hunting or farming) based on how endangered the species is, which is why I have no problem with the killing of cows, pigs, etc. – though I do care about their quality of life – but am pained by the killing of members of endangered species.
Humans, being grossly overpopulated, rank pretty low on the list, then. There are almost 250,000 humans per lion. If there was a button that would kill 100 random humans and create a lion, I would press it repeatedly.
I suppose most people here would disagree with me…
“If there was a button that would kill 100 random humans and create a lion, I would press it repeatedly.”
As I’m sure you know, if you’re serious, this puts you well outside the norm for humans (many sigma outside the mean). Evolution has not fitted us for favoring our predators over our own species.
“our predators”? Not really. AFAIK, lions don’t normally eat people.
Besides, evolution seems to have fitted us quite well for killing each other. Bugger evolution.
cr
The question is, what if you were one of the 100 humans to go with the first push of the button? Would you still do it (of course, in that case you could push only once – unless you ask Karen to push it for you).
I certainly wouldn’t exclude myself from the selection. If I knew I’d die with the first press I’d want to rig it to substantially bolster the populations of 100 or 1000 different species. Perhaps I could use the Homer Simpson drinking bird technique. 😛
If your question is “would you trade your life for a single lion?” then the answer is “yes”, but I’d be disappointed that, having access to magic powers, I couldn’t do more.
Why golly yes, I sure do. It’s one thing to want to prevent 100 conceptions. But murder random people so you can have one extra lion to help round out what you think Nature needs?
Tell me: if you could press a button that would send out your own little army to kill 100 humans — would you do it to create 1 lion? Would you press THE button, the red one that launches a nuclear warhead if that meant a whopping 1,000 members of endangered species now come into being?
Yeesh. You may be 1 lab experiment away from being a Super-Villain, as the saying goes.
If the army chooses people randomly from the world population and kills them instantly, then I don’t see any difference.
Nuclear warheads are messy and grievously injure a lot more people than they kill. (I’d rather be dead than badly and permanently maimed.) And the deaths outside the instant-kill radius are often slow and horrible. The human suffering would be much greater. But I think that only demands a correspondingly greater benefit. Would it be worth nuking my own city if it magically fixed all (other) ecological and environmental problems? I certainly think so. But of course there’s no such magic, so until my evil villain science kit arrives in the mail, it remains a thought experiment… 😛
Well yes I do disagree, because my question is “what difference would it make?”
Estimates of deaths from all causes in WW2 are around 70 to 85 million, yet it caused barely a dent in the human population growth.
If your button caused all women to become sterile after two live births it might do some good.
PS I wasn’t intending to pick on women specifically, but it might be more difficult for the hypothetical machine to discern when men have produced their two offspring.
Now that would be a button well worth pressing (whether it worked on women or men), and whether it generated more lions or not.
cr
You almost make my point for me. 🙂 You’re right that it needn’t make much difference to the human population. 75 million could be traded to bolster the populations of 75 other species by 20-200% each. It could be sustainably done every year, and for a different set of species. That’s a big ecological difference. Sounds like a small price to pay to save the great apes, large cats, elephants, rhinos, and {choose a few hundred more}.
I’m not anti-human. I’m just pro-diversity. It bothers me to see ancient Amazon tribes being wiped out by illegal logging just as it does to see charismatic and keystone fauna wiped out by poaching. To lose ancient human cultures and a thousand species of mammal would permanently degrade the character and beauty of the world in a way that losing a billion random humans would not. (That would just reduce us to the population that we had in the year 2000.) And losing a thousand species of mammal isn’t fantasy. I’ve read predictions that we’re on track to lose about half of all mammal species – 2700 of them – over the next century, if we don’t halt global heating and habitat destruction. I’d rather lose the billion humans.
Of course I do agree that sterility after X children would be much better. I’m not proposing the magical button as the ideal, only using it to exemplify my feelings on the matter.
I agree with you. Though killing a billion does seem drastic. Now if you could produce a magic reset button such that a billion or two had never been born, I’d push it right now. I’d venture to say that the effects on the environment – and society in general – would almost universally be positive.
cr
Dare I ask, when you orgasmically press this imaginary button in your mind, am I to speculate that you are hoping it will kill mostly brown people in third world countries, like myself? Or my brown children?
Misanthropes tend to hate people of other races more.
I said it would be randomly selected from the world’s population. Personally I would hope that it wouldn’t kill my friends, but it would be unfair to exclude anyone from selection. I wouldn’t hope it would kill anyone in particular, except maybe poachers.
Whether or not it mostly kills “brown people” depends largely on which Asians you consider to be brown, since most people are Asian. It seems to me that a random sampling of the world would be less than half brown or black.
Before I comment on the Great (animal) Cmunicator, I want to say briefly how grateful I am for this forum. The daily doses of sanity and perspective have, perhaps more often than even you would suspect, preserved my sanity by preventing neo-con fuelled despair from (and neo-lib fuelled, as it pertains laissez-faire capitalism) turning this amicable, cat- and jazz-loving atheist into a frothing, frontal cortex-bypassing, totalizing hate merchant consumed with the most noxious delusions of the (self) righteousness of my fury, and the exquisite suffering I shall exact.upon the deserving. Or, in short, this forum enables me to stay me, rather than to become Newt Gingrich.
That said (with the near-Reagan Era clown for reference), let us move to the issue of The Great (animal) Communicator. As you pointed out at the end of the post, there is most likely an unholy tryptych of smarminesd driving such archly contrived stupidity: self-delusion, self-aggrandizement, cynical self-promotion. But I would like to offer a change on focus concerning the only matter of merit here: that which Cecil is said to have, um, said, according to inter-species interlocutor. You offered an interesting hypothesis to possibly explain the strangely archaic, and–dare I say it–deliberately generic sentiments which communicated more predictable, if inarguable tropes such as “take heart my child,” “light and love,” etc.
From this, I am compelled to ask some additional questions: 1) is it possible, even on a purely theoretical level, for the communicator-lion-“gentle reader” triad to be MORE OBVIOUSLY Christian? 2) And as a follow-up, why is it seemingly de riguer for the “speech” of all Asland derivatives, no matter the immediate context or diaspora over time, to always sound like a fourth-rate approximation of the reproduction from memory, a generic form of soliloquy-ness that “must” have been lifted somewhere from the writings of Kahlil Gibran; 3) with that in mind, isn’t it still amazing how the “gods” our species trumpets the loudest are always supported by “evidence” which sounds like it could have come from the believer! In other words, let Karen Anderson be the best gosh darn Karen Anderson she can be. But for Hitchen’s sake it should be obvious to EVERYONE that no feline ever, regardless of species or circumstance, would be so pompous and shallow. Attributing that vapid sentimentality to a majestic wild cat is a heinous insult to all felines. Eh, maybe the Great Communicator didn’t get the memo norlt to be so brazenly self-centered; that would be another thing she shares with Newt Gingrich.
This morning I received my own message from the Animal Other Side. Sid the Vulture asked me to relay the message “Hey Karen, stop making us look bad.”
taking a break from the jokes and the woo (and some of the unnecessarily snarky comments above) here is an interesting article from Dr. David MacDonald, research biologist from Oxford, discussing the situation. It was his group that had collard Cecil.
http://www.nature.com/news/charismatic-lion-s-death-highlights-struggles-of-conservation-scientists-1.18101
and for what it’s worth, which is nothing, I’m no fan of any kind of canned hunting (a la Dick Cheney) or trophy hunting. I grew up hunting, though I don’t any more. Hunting is a way to feed yourself; it is not a “sport”; a term fabricated by overstuffed rich a-hole aristocrats with private hunting grounds who never did a day’s labor in their worthless, inbred lives.
I am, however, reminded of Bernd Heinrich’s book “The Snoring Bird” which details his childhood and young adulthood with his parents, including their trips to Africa to collect bird and rodent specimens for museums. Every animal collected was skinned, prepped for the museum, and the rest of the animal was eaten by them. He repeated this for his winter field biology courses at the University of Vermont, getting his students to catch, skin, and eat the field mice they caught. apparently, there’s nothing quite so tasty as a properly fried mouse. if you haven’t read it, or his other things, you’re missing out.
“unnecessarily snarky comments” ??
Are you suggesting that communicating with animals is a claim that deserves some sort of respect and shouldn’t invite mockery?
Or are you referring strictly to comments on hunting?
sometimes people say something that is not fully thought out, and the response is to jump on them and insult them instead of just explaining why they were mistaken. yes, i know this is the internet, the bastion of bastards, but on this site it’s nice that there is a bit more decorum. sometimes that slips a bit. that’s all.
I’m still not quite sure which part of the thread you have taken exception to. Your own comments about “rich a-hole aristocrats with private hunting grounds who never did a day’s labor in their worthless, inbred lives” sound more like mud-slinging than reasoned argument on the pros and cons of sport hunting.
i meant towards other commenters here, not towards those like Palmer who have done something quite worthy of vitriol, or the woo-lady who clearly deserve some ridicule, but never mind.
My cat said Karen Anderson is a fraud.
Between the two, I have no logical choice but to believe your cat. My cats told me so. And they’re boss(es).
I’ve heard of “pet seances” – this doesn’t strike me as too far removed from that.
Cecil’s message has been loud and clear. Those idiots who shoot “wild animals” are being called out as idiots. Shooting a bison or any animal at a “preserve” or “game ranch” is about like shooting a milk cow and every bit as sporting. The dentist’s business is no more, and the dentist has disappeared – at least for the time being. The Kenyan government is after him and such aggressive policing has been on the decline since Richard B. Leakey was the Kenyan equivalent of the Secretary of the Interior. His poacher control was orders to the game wardens to shoot poachers, and the wardens carried, I believe, AK47s, to shoot them. This has put this whole sham “big game hunting” right on the front page of even the New York Times. These people are sick people. With modern weapons and scopes a person can just about hit a dime at a half mile. Sportsmen? Not even close. Contemptible. Completely.
In a somewhat ironic gesture, one of his last acts before disappearing was to put out a message from his office saying that his office would be happy to cooperate with authorities, they just had to give him a call.
He has also been found guilty and fined for prior animal-related offenses, namely lying to the (IIRC) the Fish & Wildlife Service as to the location of a bear he shot.
All this put together, I don’t have any sympathy for his “I thought it was a legal hunt” excuse. The guy is obviously a liar and has had no qualms about breaking hunting regulations to kill animals illegally in the past.
Indeed. I’d actually have some respect for the guy if he stalked, hunted, and killed a lion with a spear or knife. That would take real courage. Or even if he stalked a lion with a crossbow on foot in its natural habitat.
But people who pay to kill lions and the like almost always lure them out with food and shoot them from positions of safety, usually from elevated platforms where they take absolutely no risk. Can you really call that “hunting”? There’s certainly no honor in it.
I missed my country – Zimbabwe it is. Still I heartily approve of Leakey’s approach to poacher control.
A much better ‘seance’ with Cecil:
You know, I really tire of this “you can’t express outrage about this, until you express sufficient outrage (in my opinion) about that.”
Outrage isn’t a limited resource, you know. Heck, I’ve got plenty to go around. And many people have expressed outrage, myself included, over the things you are outraged about.
Perhaps one thing you are missing in all this is that for many of us, this just isn’t about an animal. I feel acute anxiety and despairing helplessness over the rapid disappearance of wildlife from this earth. That picture of Palmer grinning his perfect bleached-teeth smile over the body of a lion is like a punch in the gut to me. Intellectually, I can appreciate the case to be made for trophy hunting as a conservation tool–emotionally, I want to reach into that photo and strangle Palmer.
And, yes, in case you are wondering, I felt enormous outrage and horror over that video of Walter Scott being shot in back by the policeman. As I said, I have enough outrage to go around.
“Why do humans do this? Self-delusion, self-aggrandizement, cynical self-promotion; take your pick.”
Reminds me of Ceausescu (I don’t think he was cynical):
“Between 1955–1989 it is unofficially estimated that Ceaușescu’s hunting parties shot over 4000 brown bears.”
“For years, he was dubbed as “country’s first hunter”, a title he acquired after claiming many trophy animals including world record European brown bear, but the sportsmanship of his methods is subject to debate and generally shunned upon.”
(Wikipedia)
How is this different than serial killing?
The dentist flies around the world to indulge hobby of killing for fun, adding in different killing method to make it more interesting for him.
I get that there is a difference between killing humans and killing animals . Yet abuse of animals is one of the early indicators of future criminality, and sociopathy/antisocial personality disorder.
Humans are, it seems, evolved at least in part as hunters, so I guess we may have some instinct for killing for food. Still, I can’t help but think that trophy hunting is, largely, a socially approved oulet for sociopathic tendency’s.
The good thing, if there is a good thing from this story is that it is not socially approved for anyone, mental defective or otherwise. This guy, who so quickly showed his mug all over face book and twitter is now hiding out. Fifty years ago Minnesota folks would have pinned a metal on him. Today they rightly put him out of business.
I think it’s much more like sports (of other sorts) and other “adrenalin” experiences (climbing, steep skiing, fast driving, etc.).
Substitutes for what we (males, mainly) evolved to do: Fight off predators, fight off rivals, hunt for food, war on neighboring tribes, etc.
Not always for a fee. I know a real life “animal whisperer” who telepathically communicates with pets to find out why they’re misbehaving. Yes, she charges — but she also does it for free. Talking to her, it did not strike me as her cynical way of manipulating others. She believes.
That’s too short a list, I think. If we look at what “Cecil” is saying it sounds just like all the other amazing, enlightening, astonishing messages God, angels, aliens, or Spirit Beings have been bringing to the earth beings in order to change everything: the revelation that it’s okay.
No, really, everything is going to be all right. In fact, it’s perfectly fine right now. Don’t worry. Don’t struggle. Don’t cry. I’m here to make it all better. Now go to sleep.
A lot of humans apparently want their mommies back. Or, maybe, they want the mommy they never had. And sometimes they want to BE the humble, comforting, reassuring mouthpiece of this all-knowing source of comfort and reassurance.
This woman doesn’t call herself an animal whisperer, she calls herself a medium on her website. That’s a way different claim.
I have no problem per se with people trying to help owners with their pets’ behavioral issues.
~Grania
I agree. And when I was introduced to this person as an “animal whisperer” I naturally assumed that she was just very good at understanding and working with animals. No. She also did animal reiki and communicated telepathically with them … in English.
When she heard me express some polite skepticism she immediately challenged me to a debate — on the spot (coffee shop) — in which she guaranteed she would PROVE to me that reiki was scientific (she dropped the other part, or maybe that came up later.)She wanted to shake hand on it. “To be resolved: Animal reiki is scientific.”
Astonished, I accepted. Holy crap, from a New Ager? At last.
It did not go … the way she expected. And despite the buckets of praise and reassurance I poured on her for her competence and love of animals she was a very sore loser. She will not do that again, I bet.
When she sees me now she turns her back. Gosh, I’d sure love to continue, though. I nod to her, as to an old friend.
Yikes. Still, I guess no-one likes losing that sort of challenge, no matter how nice you are about it.
I try to just bite my tongue when colleagues discuss the merits of this reiki healer over that reiki healer over gluten-free lunch. They know my opinions, but sometimes I just smile politely and read The Twitterz instead.
~Grania
“It did not go … the way she expected. And despite the buckets of praise and reassurance I poured on her for her competence and love of animals she was a very sore loser. She will not do that again, I bet.”
Wait, how did you prove to her that Reki isn’t scientific such that even she had to recognize she lost? I’ve never had a believer awknowlege any evidence that contradicts their preconception. What did you do?
She lost in that she did not convince me — which was her original claim. She, of course, put that down to the idea that there was no way anything could convince me. Which I suppose is expected, given that she proudly told me nothing on earth could ever change her mind. “I know what I know!”
It turned out that her major piece of evidence was that some nursing organization had come out and endorsed reiki. Apparently this had clinched it for every other mildly skeptical person she’d encountered, I guess. When I began to carefully explain to her why a group of nurses was not equivalent to a scientific consensus — and what that was and why it would involve some very serious replicated experiments and consensus across disciplines — she started trying to change the topic. I don’t do that.
So- WOW! (or is is, WOO-W?)- is he going to come back then, like the lion in, “The Chronicles of Narnia?”
“Raise your vibration” is a secret code phrase that alerts rational people: when they see it, they know instantly that everything said after it is most likely bullshit (as well as probably everything said before it, too).
Vibrations is one of those words that lights the Woo Indicator(tm). quantum is another one, careless use of the word ‘energy’, and frequent use of the phrase ‘so called’. There are lists of other woo words on the interweb – the only thing that stops me playing Woo Bingo is that it is too easy…
The next time somebody talks of vibrations – ask them what is vibrating. If they talk about ‘energy’ ask them what particle is involved.
The price the dentist has paid, rightly or wrongly has gone well beyond 50k.
I hope others who do this kind of hunting are taking note.. there are costs you need to consider that are out of your control, this very human reaction may be out of the sphere of rationality but the dentist has made a grave mistake.
Hunting in game parks and all that means, i.e. wildlife preservation, local economy, etc and for now, seems the only useful way to achieve a working model to help save big animals(apart from zoos) is it, stick with it or pay a price.
I don’t mind saying I smell a rat when it comes to what he knew before he fired his crossbow.
Cecil told me he would have given the dentist are good look at his teeth and for nothing.
I’m not a big fan of trophy hunting, though I do not condemn it completely. With proper legal controls, it can be sustainable and profitable.
If the dentist wanted to shoot big animals, he can just go to Texas and cull wild pigs. Estimates is that there are over a million of them, destroying local crops, damaging forests, and competing with local fauna as they are also invasive species.
And you can have bacon afterwards!
Funny, I thought humans were the invasive species. Maybe that misapplied second amendment does some service after all.
This same dentist is a serial lawbreaker with respect to illegal animal killings:
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/cecil-lion-killer-walter-james-palmer-has-bear-related-felony-n400226
What a jackass.
No, no. Cecil talked to ME last night. And he said:
“Boy you people sure a F*&^ing gullible.”
My dentist spent $2,500 at the vet to save her pet rabbit. I’d rather have a dentist who would do this, than one who spends their money to fly to Zimbabwe to shoot a defenseless lion.
Seems she got a crossed connection and was actually talking to Aslan.
I had felt a little derisive to this animal communicator, until a post by one of her followers changed my mind. “She can’t prove that she “spoke” to Cecil and no one can prove that she didn’t,….50/50 chance”
That mathematical rigor has made me a half believer.
50/50 chance? Ya, me too. At least 25/75 anyway.
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
Beston, Henry. “The Outermost House,” 1926.
Well said…with the expressivity
of the time.
My pick? This.