♪ (punk rock music) ♪
- (reporter) For tourists on safari. this is the dream shot.
(camera shutters click)
- Is this--? I think I heard about this.
- The lion that got killed.
- (reporter) ...but the term coined by big game hunters
for the five most dangerous African animals to hunt on foot,
and that's exactly what happened to this lion.
Cecil, with his distinctive dark mane, was a star.
- Okay, I did hear about this, but I had no idea what was happening.
- (reporter) Cecil was lured out of the protected park with bait,
then he was shot, first with an arrow,
then 40 hours later finished off with a gun
by a tourist who paid $55,000 to local guides.
- Are you serious? - (in video) The person involved...
..is a gentleman, an American called Walter James Palmer.
- Americans.
- Because white people hate America. - (reporter) Palmer...
..who's a star of his own
in the world of bow hunting. - Hate him. Hate him.
- (reporter) He's traveled the world to bag a zoo's worth of animals,
from leopards to rhinos, but not always legally.
In 2008, he was sentenced to a year of probation
for making a false statement to wildlife officials
after killing a black bear.
- Oh my gosh.
- (reporter) In a statement today, Palmer said he was sorry.
"I had no idea that the lion I took was a known, local favorite."
- It doesn't [bleep] matter!
- Then don't take the lion!
You don't take it from the park. You killed it! You killed it!
- (reporter) "I relied on the expertise of my local professional guides
to ensure a legal hunt."
- Who should have been more careful.
It's his fault.
- (reporter) An online mob lit their torches,
took to Twitter, and crashed the dentist's website.
The thing is shooting lions is legal in Zimbabwe
if you have the right permit. - What?
- (reporter) The two Zimbabweans who helped bag Cecil
will be charged with poaching.
- I hate hunting. - (reporter) Cecil's skin will be used
as evidence.
His head still hasn't been found.
(sympathetically) Mmm.
- That means he kept it! What a jerk.
- Ughhhh! I hate people.
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- (Finebros) So had you heard about this story before today?
- No.
- This is the first time that I've actually been hearing this.
- Oh yeah.
- It was all over Twitter.
- Usually, everything I hear about something,
I always hear it from Twitter first.
- Why are you trying to shoot a lion?
No one thinks you're cool.
- What he did was wrong, obviously.
That being said, I feel like people take it to another extreme.
Instead of focusing so much on the dentist,
maybe focus on the organization and be like, "This is what they
were trying to do, this is their website.
Maybe you can go help them out."
- (Finebros) What do you think should happen
to Walter James Palmers for doing this? - He needs to go to jail for life.
- I mean, I know a lot of people want him dead,
but let him suffer.
- This guy has a history of hunting endangered, illegal animals,
and then now he does this?
Might as well just put him in jail and have him learn his lesson.
- (Finebros) So this kind of thing has happened for centuries
with people killing animals,
but this time, because of social media, it blew up.
Without the internet, we would likely not even know about this.
What is your thoughts about the power of social media
when it comes to these types of things?
- Oh, nobody's safe. (laughs)
- That's great that we can bring these people to justice.
- I feel like that media's a good part to spread news,
but... it does get carried away.
- If one person does it, that's very popular,
a lot of people start doing it.
And so it's definitely the Twitter mob mentality,
like the Ice Bucket Challenge.
You know how many of those people didn't donate money probably?
- If you piss off the internet, you're in pretty deep [bleep].
(laughing) Um... but, you know, it also is kind of frustrating
because it picks and chooses what it wants to be upset about.
- (Finebros) Why do you think this story resonated,
that got so many people upset?
- I think it's just because it's a famous lion.
- It's really easy to hate on this guy.
He did all these terrible things, and he's a dentist!
It's easy to criticize, and you'd be right to hate on it
and criticize it.
- (Finebros) Why do you think this guy and others
go to kill animals like lions?
What's their motivation?
- I think they just get a rush.
- They're evil and heartless
and they don't understand the value of life.
- I grew up around sport hunting.
It's something that you're raised into.
- To me, the only reason that they would do it
is for the trophies. Say, "I killed a lion!"
It's not like you fought it hand-to-hand.
You shot it from a range with an arrow and a gun.
Only reason you should be hunting anything
is if you have the need to survive.
- (Finebros) Do you think there's ever a valid reason to hunt an animal?
- No, actually-- unless you hunt for food.
- There are some traditions where they do hunt for food.
- If you have to do it, I understand that you have to do it.
But that doesn't really make me okay with it.
- I think people just like to shoot guns at things and watch them die.
That's basically what hunting is.
There's no fun in it.
- Honestly, we live in a pretty civilized nation now.
We're not out there hunting for food any more.
Now it's just for sport.
- I know people do enjoy hunting and that's just what they like to do.
Okay. But hunting animals like rhinos and lions, no!
(laughs) That's not right.
- If there's over-population problems with predators
and that sort of thing, where it's endangering the balance
of the ecosystem, I think limited tagging is acceptable.
Personally, I will not hunt.
If I had to kill my own animals to eat meat,
I would probably be a vegetarian.
- (Finebros) Are you a vegetarian? - No.
- No.
- No, I'm not a vegetarian.
- I'm not a vegetarian!
Being vegan and vegetarian is very expensive.
- I might even become vegan because my auntie is.
The connection I have with the animals is mostly just a feeling of love.
- (Finebros) So how do you justify that in your own head,
where you don't think it's right to kill animals,
but you're okay with eating some of them?
- Oh gosh!
I don't know! That's so hard.
I like In-N-Out.
- Don't call me out on my hypocrisy, okay?
I feel like that's a little more justifiable because it's like,
"Okay, these things are meant for this,
and these things are meant to be in the wild."
I've seen lots of documentaries about our food system.
It's terrible.
I try to at least eat organic.
- As long as we kill the animal in the most humane way
and the quickest way possible, where the animal doesn't suffer much,
I don't see anything wrong with that.
- (Finebros) So back to this specific story,
some people have said that this is tragic,
but the public response is out of balance
compared to the horrible things that happen to humans every day,
yet we're making a huge deal for this lion.
What do you think about that?
- I just kind of feel like the lion is not even really that important
because it happens all the time.
People hunt every single day.
And I just feel like that's just a waste of time to put
all this effort into it.
- For some reason, we're so drawn to animals.
If there's a sad movie and a dog dies, everyone sobs.
Sad movie and the girl dies, a couple people might lose a tear.
- The fact that there are other problems going on
doesn't minimize the fact that this problem is still horrible.
We kind of have to pick which ones we get to fight.
You don't always get to fight every problem.
- We see human atrocities every day, the murders, the massacres.
That type of stuff, yeah it gets a crap ton of attention
for a certain amount of time.
We're so desensitized to human atrocities
that when something else happens to an animal,
specifically endangered animals, it just blows up.
- I guess 'cause the lion doesn't involve racism.
'Cause when it's like, "Oh, it's a live person that's killed"
and everyone's gonna have their own opinion on it.
But with the lion, I feel like everyone's on the same page.
- (Finebros) Is there any positive when things like this happen?
- No. When people say "stop bullying", it's probably still gonna happen.
- I think it's just good because then you get a lot more advocators
who care about a certain thing.
- People get to see that this is a problem
and it's actually happening, and people kind of come together
to say, "Hey, we don't like this. We don't support this.
We don't want this to happen any more."
- I've actually seen multiple petitions and such
to make the international hunting laws stricter.
- Figuring out what caused this man to do this,
why, psychologically, what would drive him to do something like this
and maybe we can learn from that ourselves
and try to adapt and make our society better.
- (Finebros) So finally, we're going to show you a picture of Cecil,
just to get your thoughts about this lion.
- He looks so peaceful!
- See, look at that! How could you kill that?
It's beautiful and powerful.
- I can't look at this and think about killing it.
I think about admiring the beauty.
- It's upsetting because it was also an animal that was being
watched by people and being cared for.
It's tragic.
- No, but he's so pretty... and they killed him!
This guy should've still been living out in his actual habitat,
where he was supposed to be.
- It's true that lions are actually very peaceful.
You know, large and dangerous-- but peaceful creatures.
So... I don't know.
It takes a certain amount of convincing, I think,
for a person to go out and kill something like that.
I happened to have read a statistic on the internet about this,
that the amount of money that Zimbabwe brought in
taking tourists out to photograph Cecil
was twice the amount in one day then it was for the hunter to kill him.
So...
(silence)