The real scandal of killing Cecil the lion: the price

The death of Cecil the lion at the hands of an American dentist who paid $50,000 to shoot him with an arrow is a scandal, an outrage that demonstrates once again our shameful and cruel mismanagement of rare and exotic creatures. But the scandal is not that Cecil was killed. The scandal was the price.

The death of Cecil has attracted much attention because people feel strongly about big, interesting animals like lions. A lot of those people feel that such animals should not be killed for human entertainment. And that’s a perfectly respectable position; I have a lot of sympathy with it. If you feel that way, it makes sense to want better policing of wildlife and greater protection of rare animals, measures that make it harder to shoot animals like Cecil. But even the best system of policing and protection will not change one awkward fact here.

That fact is that some people want to kill large animals for fun, and always will. I am not one of them; I can't see why you'd kill something you weren't going to eat, or that didn't need to be killed for reasons of pest control or herd management. Never mind: some people get off on whacking lions and the like. That appetite creates demand, a demand that the world will always attempt to satisfy.

As things stand that demand is satisfied, often clandestinely, by park rangers and others generally paid a pittance to watch over rare animals, who accept bribes from hunters. In other cases those rangers are simply outgunned by commercial poachers who can earn vast sums bagging rare creatures for others. The bottom line is that our current system of managing and protecting large, interesting and shootable animals is not working. Just ask Cecil.

No one owned Cecil. In one way, that’s as it should be: he was a glorious wild animal, running free. Of course no one owned him. But that’s also the problem. If no one owns something, how do you determine its value? And if something has no defined value and no owner, where’s the incentive to protect and preserve it?

Nominally, I suppose, Cecil was a nationalised lion, owned by the Zimbabwean state, but that state put no formal value on him, and manifestly failed to protect him.

Let’s imagine Cecil had instead been owned by Lion Corp International, the sort of big multinational company so many people like to be nasty about these days (often while wearing the cheap clothes they sell, after eating the cheap food they produce and using the cheap portable communications devices they create, all of which they pay for with the wages that such companies pay them.)

For Lion Corp, Cecil would be a valuable asset, to be properly maintained and protected and yes, disposed of – for the right price. Until and unless that price was realised, his owners would have a clear incentive to care for him, which would mean maintaining his environment and paying professional rangers to watch over him properly. The chances of Lion Corp staff being bribed to lure a valuable lion off company land so he could be shot with an arrow then skinned would be lower than they are under the regime that oversaw Cecil’s death.

When time came to realise the value of the asset (i.e. shoot Cecil), the company would do so in an orderly and profit-maximising way, perhaps by auction. My guess is that the price for shooting Cecil would be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, reflecting high demand, the scarcity of the event, and the high costs of maintaining a lion.

Since the shooting would take place openly in the market regulated by the relevant government, it would be done efficiently and humanely. Cecil would die a quick and clean death instead of the slow and squalid demise he suffered in the unregulated black market.

Alternatively, some of the many millions of people unhappy at the death of animals like Cecil might outbid the hunters and pay for the beast to stay alive, an option largely denied to them today. You can help fund preservation projects and charities, but you can’t directly pay to keep an animal alive. If a profit-seeking company had owned Cecil, he’d probably be around today, since lion-lovers would surely be able to muster more cash (perhaps by crowd-funding?) than even the most determined and wealthy hunter.

Assigning ownership of big game to big companies would also surely lead to a better response to poaching and illegal hunting than we have today. Bribing a few low-paid rangers to let you shoot an ownerless animal is a very different prospect to illicitly destroying the very valuable property of a big international company. Such companies would be better able to fund appropriate protective measures than the cash-strapped governments whose territories often contain exotic species.

At the end of all this, Lion Corp would turn a profit on the animal’s death, or life. Why else would they have gone to all that trouble? Some of that profit would go to the owners of the company. Some would go to the local government in tax. And some would be used to procure and raise more lions, who would yield more profit in future. Some of those lions, after leading happy, healthy properly managed lives, might then be shot.

Cecil the lion was born free. That was why he died so cheaply, and so badly. If you care about wild animals, privatise them.