Cecil: The Lion and the Dentist review – Inside the horrific big cat murder that outraged the world | television

TThere are a lot of unanswered — and perhaps unanswerable — questions in the air right now. Questions like what drives a husband to drug his wife and invite strange men into his home for a decade to rape her while she lies unconscious in the marital bed? Or: What kind of person would you have to be to hang out with a billionaire convicted child sex offender who practices his perversions in plain sight, even if you’re not fully involved in them? Or: If, a year into your presidency, you do have citizens being murdered in the streets by uniformed thugs, what happens next?

It’s almost a relief to have to step away and think for a moment about a slightly older, younger question; That is, what makes a person want to kill an animal for sport? Not for food, not in defense of a home, family or livestock, just for fun. Just so we can say they did it and take a photo with the body to prove it.

It becomes more difficult (although the principle remains the same) when other guides and hunters have to clear the path for the kill – because you don’t even have the skills to find and hunt the animals yourself. Added to this is the fact that as the hunter aims higher and higher up the food chain, the rarer and more valuable the monsters become.

So, on to Cecil: The Lion and the Dentist, which focuses on the 2015 killing of a lion in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park by an American bounty hunter named Dr. Walter Palmer. The documentary uses it as a lens through which to examine the interconnectedness between Zimbabwe’s indigenous people, a hunting and safari industry that largely serves wealthy white tourists, and national parks that seek to protect African wildlife while having to sacrifice some for the sake of the national economy.

Cecil became famous for being – even for a lion – exceptionally majestic and beautiful. He was huge, a proud boss, and was still a force to be reckoned with at the age of twelve. It was one of the animals being tracked by a team from Oxford University who was studying the animals at Hwange partly so that they could set sustainable annual quotas for poachers. In June 2015, one of the team leaders noticed that data from Cecil’s collar was no longer being recorded. A few days later, they found his body, skinned and decapitated. Piecing together the story from local guides, it appears that Cecil crossed the park boundary into the hunting area and was shot by Palmer, who had been brought there by local professional hunter Theo Bronkhorst. Between the murder and the discovery of the body, Palmer returned to the United States.

There was no quota for lion hunting in the area that year. Too many of them had been killed too young in the previous year and the population needed to recover. Palmer claimed he was relying on local knowledge, and Bronkhorst was arrested, but charges against him and the owner of the land on which Cecil was killed were eventually dropped. However, the global media seized on the story, and there was widespread outrage over the animal’s death and Palmer’s conviction.

The film vividly retells this side of the story. But when you try to look at the bigger picture, it becomes frustratingly fragmented and superficial. The report mentions the original displacement in 1928 of ancestral tribes, who hunted but lived in balance with the local flora and fauna, to facilitate the creation of Hwange National Park, but it does not explain the reasons – and there must have been reasons, good or bad – behind it. It comes down to the lack of transparency around how money raised from hunting is distributed: some is supposed to go to neighboring communities whenever an animal is “taken,” but that rarely happens, making you wonder why this should be, who is at fault, and where any potential corruption lies. There is no question as to whether there are animal populations that really need to be controlled, and therefore whether it is foolish to look the carcass of a profitable gift in the mouth. Are Westerners too sentimental about animals (and should the agitated nature of some of the protesters outside Palmer’s office influence our opinion of his actions)? Or do those who live next to them feel intense pride in a precious resource that goes beyond mere financial sense? A curious final comment seems to conflate hunting with the photography industry which also does well with African safaris – but could it really be that bad?

Of course, a good documentary should raise questions. But that’s not much to answer.