The line of demarcation is between hunting the rare and endangered animal and hunting common animals that are not endangered. So lions, tigers, elephants etc are off limits. Deer, elk, fish (most species) are okay.
The dentist is not alone in his this. Two game wardens at the national park lured this lion out of the protected area by dragging a fresh carcass behind a jeep. Shooting lions outside the national park is legal apparently.
Killing this lion was worse because this lion was used to humans, which may have made it easier to lure him from safety. That’s despicable.
Does the US have an extradition treaty with Zimbabwe?
This would help. I doubt that Dr. Scumbag would have dropped $50K to lure and ambush – sorry,“hunt” – and brutally execute – sorry, “take” – Cecil if he’d known ahead of time that he couldn’t bring back the proof of his manhood – sorry, “hunting” “skill.”
[Cecil the lion’s death prompts calls to ban trophy hunt imports to US](Cecil the lion's death prompts calls to ban trophy hunt imports to US | Animals | The Guardian)
The hunters spotted him in the sanctuary at night using lights, then lured him out. They knew exactly what they were doing. When he came onto private land, Palmer shot him. So he was right there — he had to know they were luring the animal out of the sanctuary. There was another male lion in this pride apparently, Jericho, and I suppose if he had been the one killed, there might not have been the same hew and cry.
Personally, I think they went in looking for Cecil because his mane is so distinctive. I think Palmer is lying through his teeth and I hope that he never lives this down.
If it was all perfectly legal, then why are his two accomplices in court in Zimbabwe on criminal charges of illegal hunting? The owner of the game farm didn’t have a license to hunt, and the “professional hunter”/guide/outfitter is charged with “failing to prevent an unlawful hunt” insofar as he supervised his client, Palmer, in killing the lion after baiting it out of the national park, where it was protected.
“The head of Zimbabwe’s safari association said the killing was unethical and that it couldn’t even be classified as a hunt, since the lion killed by an American dentist was lured into the kill zone,” an Associated Press story datelined July 29 in Harare reported. Brockhoerst, the professional hunter, has subsequently had his professional license revoked by the Safari Operators Association of Zimbabwe because of the way the killing was done.
“Ethics are certainly against baiting. Animals are supposed to be given a chance of a fair chase,” Emmanuel Fundira, the association’s president, said on Tuesday. “In fact, it was not a hunt at all. The animal was baited and that is not how we do it. It is not allowed.”
I’d have more sympathy with Palmer’s alibi that he thought it was all perfectly legal if this was his first time at this sort of thing, but it wasn’t. He’s an experienced big game hunter who has previously been to Africa to kill a leopard, an elephant, and according to some reports, a rhinocerous. He should know the ropes by now. And he’s also been convicted of poaching then lying about it before, when he killed a bear in Wisconsin 40 miles from the permissible kill zone, then hauled it back to the lawful zone and falsely registered it as having been killed there. He’s a greedy, rapacious, bloodthirsty poacher with a huge ego and tiny manliness, utterly devoid of a moral compass.
http://www.startribune.com/zimbabweans-linked-to-illegal-lion-hunt-appear-in-court/319345491/
Please petition to have this pond scum expedited to ISIS headquarters. They have no problems mounting trophies. Then send his pieces to Zimbabwe for display.
Yes, the U.S. does have an extradition treaty with Zimbabwe, but it has a “dual criminality” clause under which the offense must be a criminal offense in both countries punishable by more than one year in prison. The problem here is that killing the lion may not be a criminal offense in the U.S., since African lions aren’t listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act. However, the Fish and Wildlife Service is currently considering listing lions as threatened, with a final listing decision expected in October. That may be one reason Palmer was so anxious to bag his lion now, because once it’s listed, it would be unlawful under U.S. law to transport his “trophy” back to the U.S. or to possess it in the U.S. (Previously killed specimens would be grandfathered). So, connecting the dots, that may partly explain why he went outside the law in Zimbabwe; he might have seen this as his last chance to add a lion’s head to his trophy collection, and when he couldn’t find a way to do that lawfully, he resorted to poaching—something he was not above doing in the past, even for a black bear, a very common animal in the Upper Midwest.
There’s another possibility, though. Some reports are now saying that part of the $54,000 Palmer says he paid for his “safari” actually went to bribe officials in the national park to look the other way while Palmer and his guides baited Cecil to his death. Bribery is a felony under U.S. law, even when it’s committed on foreign soil, and I’m quite certain the maximum penalty is more than one year in prison. So if they can prove he bribed, or conspired to bribe, park wildlife officers, he could be extradited. Or he could be prosecuted and convicted right here in the U.S. The Justice Department and the Fish and Wildlife Service are investigating. If they can track down solid evidence, I should think they’d want to prosecute here. There’s a huge, multi-billion dollar black market in unlawful trafficking in wildlife, and it’s not often a case comes along that garners this much attention, and this much public outrage.
Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, himself an avid hunter and angler, weighs in:
Quoted in Minneapolis StarTribune.
How can we help bring this guy to trail @bclintonk?
To trial?
Sometimes, karma gets some hunters (too bad it was not the one-legged American client):
Here’s what the Minnesota newspapers are reporting:
So I surmise that once Palmer settled the sexual harassment suit with his former receptionist/patient, the Board of Dentistry agreed to drop disciplinary proceedings against him. Sexual harassment of a patient would be a very serious ethical violation for a doctor or dentist, as would, presumably, sexual harassment of an employee. Absent the settlement, they probably would have taken some kind of disciplinary action, but they might have considered the $127,000 payoff sufficiently “corrective.” But they also took note of his prior felony conviction on poaching-related charges and warned him to clean up his act on record-keeping, which he apparently promised to do. But these are shots across the bow, short of actual disciplinary measures.
Don’t you think the prior 2006 criminal conviction kills his credibility? He’s already proven that he has little to no regard for hunting laws, and he’s already proven that he’ll lie to authorities about this sort of thing, so why should we believe him now?
I’m confident this guy knew exactly what was going on and was likely encouraging it. Can’t you just hear what he was likely screaming at these guys… " I paid you $50,000 to shoot a lion so you better find me a lion to shoot now!"
bclinton, thanks for that very helpful info in #127 (and 132 – how does this guy sleep at night?)
This slime needs to go away to prison.
I like your idea about ISIS. Maybe we could get a one-time extradition deal with them?
Even though the revulsion that I feel for this man’s cowardly actions is pretty darn high, it pales in comparison to the anguish, despair, and outrage I felt in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. From what I’ve observed so far, there are people whose ire is much more visceral over the killing of this animal than anything they felt over America’s shooting massacres. If the killing of human beings could inspire half the expressions of outrage Cecil’s death has engendered, maybe we’d actually have the national will to face the wholesale mowing down of innocent people head on. But, we don’t. So I suppose the point is moot.
poetsheart, if you were to go back and look at the Newtown thread, I think you’d see the same anguish and outrage there, from a lot of the same posters who are on this thread. Both are horrific and despicable acts against innocent life, which shock the conscience and come from the dark heart of a sociopath. I’m capable of feeling outrage about both.
http://time.com/3977018/cecil-lion-walter-palmer-letter/
The Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority said in a statement that the killing of Cecil was likely illegal: “Ongoing investigations to date, suggest that the killing of the lion was illegal since the land owner was not allocated a lion on his hunting quota for 2015. Therefore, all persons implicated in this case are due to appear in court facing poaching charges.”