Cecil

In the summer of 2015 the violent death of an African lion ignited worldwide outrage.
 
Shot, tracked, shot again, decapitated and skinned, the 13 year old head of the Pride suffered a long and undignified death. His killer? A millionaire dentist from Minnesota who paid $100k to shoot him with a bow and arrow.
 
But this was no ordinary lion. Once the biggest tourist attraction in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park and part of an Oxford University research programme, this lion had a name: Cecil. As the story went viral, and the circumstances of his death were leaked, the rage was collective and international.
 
Walter Palmer wanted a personal trophy and his name in the record books. What he got was a media storm that exploded around the world over two days in late July and a lion that became a global icon for endangered species everywhere. As his former dental assistant remarked: Karma’s a bitch.
 
In its simplest form Cecil is about the life and death of Cecil and the complex and conflicting realities of life for lions in Zimbabwe but what starts out as a story about the study of lion behaviour slowly turns the gaze back on to us and our human behaviour.
 
The events surrounding Cecil’s death exposed all the conflict and tension that exists around lions in Africa: Trophy hunters advertise them as the ultimate prize, photographic safari operators sell luxury holidays based on the promise of seeing them and researchers want to protect their numbers. What binds them together is that all of them call themselves conservationists, even the operator selling a lion hunt for $100k. Who, if anyone, is right and how do local communities benefit in this turf war?
 
Told entirely by people directly involved in the story, ultimately Cecil is a story about the West’s limited view of Africa and man’s fractious relationship with the natural world.