Cecil the Lion: What If We Find Out Cecil Wasn't Poached?

Unless you live under a rock, there is no way in Hades that you have not heard of Cecil the Lion’s dreadful demise.

Matter of fact, there has been such an international uproar over his killing that Obama is now slated to do the eulogy at Cecil’s funeral. It’s also been reported that Michelle has already contacted Cecil’s pride to give them her and Barack's condolences. It’s true. Tell everyone.

Now, before I give you my two cents as a big game hunter on the Cecil situation, right before I sat down to bang out this screed my editor pointed out to me that she just posted on my entertainment site, RedHotChaCha.com, pics of two male, Cecil-looking-lions, catching and killing a magnificent kudu bull.

It was disgusting. How could lions team up on such a gorgeous antelope and be so mean? How could this happen? I’ve never beheld lions behaving like that in a movie. According to Disney and the like, lions, warthogs and various plains game animals sing “Hakuna Matata” together.

As you will see (if you clicked the link) the lions chased the kudu down, weaving in and out of vehicles, as car loads of animal lovers with their children watched in horror as The Ghost and The Darkness broke the noble kudu bull’s neck and then commenced to crunch and munch on it in front of them like Larry The Cable Guy would a platter of nachos at a Hooter’s Macho Nacho Blow Out.

It was so sad, folks. It almost made me renounce my religion. I felt led to start a Twitter hashtag campaign I titled #KuduLivesMatter in homage to the murdered bull. It also made me say to my self, “Self, I wonder if the sweet, tender, lovable and damn near human-like lion that we call ‘Cecil' ever scared, bit and/or ultimately murdered, in a grueling and truly terrifying fashion, the food he masticated upon?” Surely not, because Cecil is our official Saint Hello Kitty and he would never ever harm or hunt an animal down like he was hunted, would he? Huh?

Being an inquiring mind I wanted to know if lions' chasing down game, scaring the crap out of it and then viciously killing it is common practice amongst the Panthera Leo's; and boy, oh boy … did I land on a stack of vicious videos of lions doing some uber-nasty shenanigans to their fellow four footed fauna.

Some PETA reps would call what the lions did “evil“ because it sure as heck wasn’t an ethical way to treat an animal. Nature is a serial killer. Fo’ real, y'all.

Befuddled, I continue to investigate further and watched several other videos of lions' eating cape buffalo calves, cows and older bulls; blue wildebeests and helpless zebras; some were actually still alive. Hello! That ain’t right. I’ve never seen that bloody display on Nickelodeon or Saved By The Bell re-runs. How can this be? Because … apparently … it be. And it be bloody, filled with suffering, screams and death bellows all doled out to innocent, beautiful animals, via some dead-ringers of Cecil The Lion. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?

Speaking of being not nice, my buddy Shaun sent me a link to man-eating lions actually killing black Zimbabweans around Lake Kariba. That was heinous. I thought #BlackLivesMatter? Apparently not to lions or Twitterers because I haven’t heard squat from them regarding these jacked up fatal maulings. We should ban lions because they’re vicious to the animal kingdom and to blacks.

Ok, I’ll stop being a cheeky douche in pointing out how daft the PETA types are and give you what I really think about the Cecil scenario.

This is what I’ve been able to deduce from true sources who are “in the know” and not some Facebook warrior going hashtag nuts with the Cecil movement while also viewing fetish porn.

According to my sources, professional hunters with boots on the ground in Zim, it looks like the professional hunter and the black Zimbabwean landowner did not have a lion on quota and therefore the taking of Cecil, or any lion for that matter, on the Antoinette farm that bordered The Hwange National Park was illegal meaning … he poached it. And hunters, especially, hate poachers. I. Mean. Hate,

So, did Palmer know? Heck if I know. That said, the ultimate onus is on the professional hunter and the landowner. If, in fact, Cecil was poached then the PH and the land-owner should be summarily crapped on to the fullest extent of the law because what they did was illegal and it gives true hunters a bad name.

However, if we find out, as the investigation unfolds, that the landowner, PH and the hunter did not shoot Cecil illegally then I think they're due a massive apology from Matt Lauer, Jimmy Kimmel and all the other Twitter # warriors for ruining their reputations before waiting for all the facts to come out.

Finally, if one wants to really get pissy, they should seek to overthrow Zim’s President Robert Mugabe because that son-of-a-bitch, along with his generals and ministers, have truly decimated Zimbabwe's wildlife with his brutal and greedy, iron fist.

What is to be done with the memory of Teddy Roosevelt?

Eerily familiar...

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.