The lioness was walking towards us. It
stopped when it caught sight of four people walking towards it on small path in
the Zambian bush– Geoffrey, the guard with a rifle, Andrew, the guide, myself,
and Jonas, a trainee guide. For a few moments, I watched this fully-grown adult
lion, perfectly framed through a forked branch in a small tree. She was yards
away. The she turned, like animals do, and walked away, leaving us realizing we
had been holding our breath, with that facial expression of wonder. We all turned
and smiled at each other and we too, turned and walked off the other way.
Last month, I was staying at a bush camp in
the South Luangwa national park in Zambia, a holiday after completing some work
in Lusaka. Encounters with wild animals in the African bush is a white
privilege. Safaris cost a lot of money. You can stay in the sort of luxury that
local people will never experience. Their encounters with wild animals – unless
they work in the tourism industry – are fraught with danger or non-existent.
People either have to eke out a living in close proximity to national parks,
leaving them exposed to crocodiles, elephants, buffalo - all animals that kill
- let alone lions and hyenas. Others, such as those living in Lusaka, may never
encounter the wildlife that draws so many foreigners to their country. Our driver James, whom I have known for over
12 years, asked me recently, “What kind of elephants do you have in England?”
It had never occurred to me that he wouldn’t know that elephants are peculiar to
Africa and Asia, and thus possibly wouldn’t know how special the wildlife of
Africa is. Only once in thirty years have I come across black Africans on
safari – a couple in the South Luangwa national park in Zambia.
I have always been interested in wildlife
and am a good amateur ornithologist. At school, all I could imagine becoming
was a wildlife ranger in Kenya. I’m glad I didn’t take that route, but I seek
out encounters with the wild whenever I travel.
On this trip and anothers, I have felt acutely uncomfortable being a
rich white tourist. Of course, that is what I am, but on this latest trip, I decided
that I didn’t want to do this kind of safari again. I do have other perspectives on Africa due to my work experiences;
but for many other tourists, this is Africa –
a land of elephants, lions, plains, forests; superb thatched lodges where
Africans ask if you want a gin and tonic or a Mosi. And of course, this is a part of Africa, but it’s a part that
has been manufactured to produce a white phantasy experience. Europeans played
a large part is establishing national parks, in the past called game parks.
British people like Norman Carr was instrumental in encouraging Zambians to set
aside land for conservation, helping to set up Kafue National Park in 1956. Years
before, he had shot his 50th elephant at the age of 20, but retired
in 1960 from the Game Department and lived the rest of his life in the Luangwa
Valley. It’s not uncommon for people – men, actually – to turn from shooting
animals to helping to preserve them, and eco-tourism is now a major industry.
Which brings us of course to Cecil the
Lion.
If you watch the video footage, you see an extraordinarily
beautiful animal. Here is a beast that can only inspire awe. To have seen him
in the wild must have been a once in a lifetime experience that you would keep
in your mind’s eye till you too die. To want to kill such an animal is beyond
all comprehension. The outpouring of outrage this week shows that the man who
killed Cecil, the American Walter Palmer is indeed a throwback, a reminder of
the times when trophy hunting was ‘normal’. The photos of him posing with a
shot leopard, rhino, other lions, are surely some kind of strange homage to an
Ernest Hemingway era. His relationship with animals deeply troubles the
contemporary consciousness, causing other men to choke with emotion and to
question Palmer’s motives, his psychological health and his manhood. See
footage of Jimmy Kimmel ‘choking’ talking about Cecil:
Palmer reportedly paid $50,000 for the privilege
of killing Cecil. Why anyone wants to kill animals in this way, as I said
above, is unfathomable to me, as is the approach to guns in North America.
President Obama has said recently that his failure to reform the gun laws in
the USA is one of the biggest disappointments of his tenure. I have written
elsewhere in this blog about the inability of Europeans to understand the North
American attitude to these weapons that cause the casual death of so many. It’s
the hunting lobby that has been very vocal about not curbing guns.
Anyway, back to Cecil.
Immersion in the natural world, having
access to green spaces, to trees and to the wildlife that live in those spaces
is one of the most fundamental aspects of mental wellbeing. More and more is
being discovered about the importance of nature and green space to our health
as humans. I’m not going to rehearse those arguments here or present evidence,
but our own personal experience confirms it. It goes without saying that such
access is based on social class, but that’s another point I’m going to leave
for now. For many people too, having strong bonds to animals is a key part of
wellbeing.
For example, alongside the coverage of
Cecil in The Guardian, there’s another story in the Society section, about a
scheme called Henpower. See:
It’s heralded as a scheme that decreases
loneliness, decreases the need for anti-psychotic medication, reduces
depression and generally increases wellbeing. It’s a project that started in
the North East of England, introducing hens – chickens – to residents of 20
care homes covering 700 residents. It’s just been extended to London and there
are plans to develop in Leeds too. It was started by a charity called Equal Arts,
to use hen-keeping to tackle social isolation, and contribute to mental health.
In my part of rural Yorkshire, hen-keeping is a normal activity, but this
project enables people to simply hold hens, and it’s proven to be calming and
therapeutic. The article is heart warming, as is the accompanying picture of a
row of elderly people each holding a hen and looking happy. Whilst hens don’t
float my boat, I could imagine cuddling an orphaned orangutan for hours on end.
The point is that contact with beings other than humans does add to our
wellbeing. An article in the BMJ from 2005 reviews the evidence about the
benefits of pet ownership and is inconclusive, but again, the lived experience
of pet owners is perhaps a better guide.
Having pets is something of
a privilege of the Global North. This rather rambling blog about the complexity
of our relationships with animals and how it affects health needs also to
consider the complexity of relations between Europe and Africa, and its focus
on Africa’s wildlife. It’s easy to see why Africans often think that Europeans
care more about animals than people. The
Oxford University study group that was studying Cecil as part of its project on
lion movements, has received thousands of pounds to its charitable trust from people
all over the world, presumably furious and saddened as a result of Cecil’s
death. (As an aside, the Devon Donkey Sanctuary in the UK got £30.7 million in
donations (2013/14 figures) yet the three biggest charities concerned with
domestic violence got £15.1 million put together. These kinds of figures do
cause bemusement among those who would put people before donkeys).
But back to that problematic relationship
between the former colonial powers and contemporary Africa - another issue that
warrants thought is the economic benefits of wildlife tourism to a poor country
like Zambia, or Zimbabwe, which is where Cecil lived. The ban on hunting has
been lifted in the area surrounding national parks, called the Game Management
Area or GMA, in order to raise more international currency for cash-strapped
African countries. Many have argued that the amount of tourist cash that could have
been generated by people coming to see Cecil far outweighs the one-off $50,000
that Palmer paid. It’s estimated that Cecil brought in the same amount every
five days that this hunter paid to kill him. In terms of raising foreign
reserves, therefore, Cecil was far more valuable alive. In Zambia recently,
everyone I met was appalled by the lifting of the hunting ban, including Zambians
working in the tourist and safari industry. For Zambia, tourism is a major contributor
to its GDP.
Although economies in certain African
countries are growing at rates faster than those in the so called ‘developed’
world, many African countries are still poor due to the legacy of colonialism,
the unfair conditions of trade, historical debt and so on. There is something symbolic about what has happened to Cecil. That one man feels he has the right to kill an
iconic animal, an animal that belongs to no one and to us all, is a moral
outrage. That African countries have to rely on cash from privileged white
people coming either to look at wildlife, or to kill them, surely too is a moral
outrage.
