Cecil the lion's legacy

BY NOW, we all know that Cecil the lion was slaughtered by a rich American dentist named Walter Palmer, who paid $50,000 to track and kill the magnificent beast in Zimbabwe in early July.

I've never understood the allure of hunting animals for kicks, whether it's offing a squirrel with a .22 or ripping into a big cat like Cecil with a crossbow.

A lot of Americans don't get it, either. Over 735,000 of them have signed a "Justice for Cecil" petition on change.org, urging punishment for those involved in Cecil's death (including the big-game tour guides Palmer hired to help hunt his prey).

The Zimbabwean government's environmental minister has called for Palmer's extradition "so that he can be held accountable for his illegal action." And top dogs in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service want a few words with the dentist, too.

But Palmer, who has shuttered his Minnesota practice in the wake of calls for his hide, has fled into hiding.

How does it feel to be hunted, Dr. Palmer?

Predictably, the American backlash against Cecil's death now has its own backlash.

Like this from Huffington Post commentator Eliyahu Federman, who writes about sexual abuse, gender equality, civil rights and police-community relations:

"Can we please calm down about Cecil the lion? Our moral condemnations are absurdly over-the-top," wrote Federman. "Whatever dentist Walter Palmer's crimes, suffering human beings deserve more attention and sympathy."

Then there was Wednesday's tweet from Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, who says news about Cecil is pulling attention away from abortion.

"Look at all this outrage over a dead lion," Rubio lamented, "but where is all the outrage over the planned parenthood dead babies."

And New York Times op-ed writer Roxana Gay, who has written about police abuse of blacks, tweeted, "I'm personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care."

What's irksome about the backlash over the backlash is its false implication that there's only so much compassion to go around. That if people are enraged about the skinning and beheading of a rare and endangered animal in Zimbabwe, they haven't the ability to be enraged, simultaneously, about other social issues whose advocates are just as passionate.

Penn marketing and psychology professor Deborah Small begs to differ with me on that point. She thinks the backlash against the backlash is actually a good thing. That when it comes to social issues, we might not, figuratively, always be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

"We have short attention spans," says Small. "We have only so many minutes in a day to talk about an issue. If too much of a scarce resource" - our own attention, the media's focus, the government's money - "are spent on one issue relative to another, we can squander our resources."

Better to focus our limited resources in ways that will have the greatest impact, she says.

Got it.

Still, our most troubling social issues can feel overwhelming. The poaching of endangered animals in the wild has been a tragedy for decades, complicated by dirty geopolitics, grinding poverty, obscene greed and clashing cultures. How does one lone American get his arms around that multilayered mess, let alone act in a way that feels as if it's made any difference at all?

He doesn't - not easily, at least. But by signing a petition or furiously typing a salient tweet about a known animal and his known killer - Cecil and Palmer - he can feel as if he has made an impact by amplifying the roar behind a horrific act.

Small calls players such as Cecil and Palmer "identifiable victims" and "identifiable perpetrators," and they're often the ones whose stories, say, hasten change in legislation because they arouse and motivate our response.

It's hard to imagine we'd ever have created a Megan's Law, for example, if 7-year-old Megan Kanka hadn't been brutally murdered by convicted sex offender Jesse Timmendequas, who lived across the street from her in Hamilton Township, N.J. Their case put a name and a face to a brand of crime so heinous it prompted legislation that created a sex-offender registry soon copied around the nation.

I also doubt that the Confederate flag - an enduring symbol of hate, bigotry and racism - ever would've been removed from the South Carolina Capitol grounds had the public not learned the names and seen photos of the church worshippers mowed down by alleged murderer Dylann Roof, who embraced the Stars and Bars.

Sadly, we seem to need poster children - or poster animals - to make urgent the actions that should've been taken long ago.

Not that these victims ever asked to be made martyrs.

Thanks to Cecil and his now-hunted killer, the poaching of endangered animals in the wild has gotten the world's attention.

It remains to be seen whether we have what it takes to keep it there.

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On Twitter: @RonniePhilly

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