Emotional mascots

We learn at a young age that animals are not created equal. The dog is a member of the family. Cows and pigs are food. Snakes are nightmares, and squirrels are road kill. Uniquely magical are those big exotic animals seen only at the zoo, whose likeness is everywhere— in cartoons, commercials, toys, and starring in every fable and myth. Long past childhood, and deep in the consciousness of humankind, animals represent. Although we think we see the natural world through the evidence-based truths of science, on a daily level we respond to animals almost entirely on the basis of socially constructed ideas and images. And when it comes to the charismatic “megafauna,” any knowledge gleaned from nature shows is eclipsed by our projected dreams and fears, especially the ones we do not acknowledge. Two examples come to mind—one old, one new. In different ways, they illustrate how our response to certain animals has very little to do with the animals themselves. The sad tale of Topsy the elephant dates back more than a hundred years, so it’s easy to see this bizarre “crime” story as a manifestation of turn-of-the-century upheavals. With Cecil the lion, we only glimpse how such an outsized response to the death of one animal reflects a complicated stew of contemporary anxieties. On Jan. 4, 1903, a large crowd gathered on Coney Island to witness the highly publicized spectacle of a rogue circus elephant being electrocuted for the “crime” of killing three men. While Topsy was not the first elephant condemned at trial, her execution offered the added thrill of demonstrating the dangerous new technology of electricity. Blasted with 6,600 volts from the Edison Company, Topsy died in seconds, an event recorded in the short film Electrocuting an Elephant, which is remarkably still viewable on YouTube. Topsy, who was 36, had once been the nation’s beloved baby elephant, the first in the United States. But like many circus elephants, she grew unpredictably violent (elephant keepers were regularly killed in the circus era), and the owners of the Adam Forepaugh Circus saw an interesting opportunity for a moneymaking execution. Newspapers reported half-seriously on the “death penalty” case for the crime of her “murders,” even speculating on her signs of contrition.

Strangely enough for such a recent era, Topsy was nowhere near an isolated case. From 1880 to 1920, at least 36 elephants were publicly executed for crimes against humans—by hanging, strangling, firing squad, and electrocution. No other animals were subjected to this disgrace. Of course, people in the late Victorian era did not believe that animals had the same intentionality and culpability as humans. But elephants were a subject of special fascination, seen as similar to us in their mental and emotional makeup, much as dogs are seen today. (And certain breeds of dog, we might note, are still condemned to die for the “crime” of attacking humans.) But it is also significant that in this era, public executions of human criminals were increasingly frowned upon and banned, despite their huge popularity. It was the time of the railroads and industrialization, which brought people to the cities to live among strangers. Crime and safety were thus a constant source of concern—one that big-city newspapers were happy to indulge with sensationalistic and lurid reporting. Since the elephant was both familiar and strange, well-loved and dangerous, the sight of this monstrous force being brought down could offer mass relief in an era obsessed with violations of the social order. An elephant execution seemed to promise the same mix of high emotions as “hanging day”—cathartic and, in some quarters, not too far from the lingering appetite for lynchings. Elephants are, after all, from Africa, and represent like human slaves the white man’s conquest of distant lands, of which they are trophies. The new fascination with electric power also helped fuel excitement over Topsy’s execution. Electricity represented the height of modern progress, but its powers were still unknown. In fact, Topsy’s electrocution has gone down in history as part of Thomas Edison’s demonstration that the alternating current (AC) produced by George Westinghouse’s company was far more dangerous than the direct current (DC) sold by his own.

In another famous case from 1916, a circus elephant known as Murderous Mary was arrested and taken to jail for killing a handler. Sentenced to death by hanging (from a railroad crane), she had to be rehung three times before a crowd of thousands—the third time to snap the news photo. Some decades later, a folklorist discovered that residents of the town confused this memory with a lynching that took place in the same town, which shows how linked the two were in the public mind. For a brief moment in modern history, the elephant attained near-human status in newspaper reports, film, and photographs. Witnessed by a limited number of city dwellers, these defining moments were absorbed by tens of thousands more through the media of the day as a kind of modern-day myth.

Fast-forward a century, and it is the death of a lion at the hands of an American dentist that rocks the headlines. Cecil, 13 and a favorite of tourists to Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, got lured out of the park and shot by crossbow, then killed two days later with a rifle. The identity of the hunter was not immediately known, until the story blew up on the Internet July 28-29 as a top-trending story on Facebook and Twitter. Cecil had a name and an identity; he had a GPS tracking collar from an Oxford University wildlife project that the hunters had tried to destroy. Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer claimed in his defense that he had not known the lion was famous, but he was forced to flee his home and close his dental practice because of harassment and threats. The reaction online and on screen was out of all proportion to the scale of the crime, making Cecil an overnight celebrity. CNN’s Piers Morgan suggested that Palmer should be skinned and decapitated. Ingrid Newkirk, director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said he should be hanged. Mia Farrow tweeted Palmer’s address. Shannen Doherty said he should be dumped in Zimbabwe and “left to the locals.” But another kind of backlash quickly followed. Columnists began questioning why the murder of one lion was generating more outrage than the ongoing drama of unarmed black people being killed by police—some half dozen cases in 2015. Although these stories have nothing to do with each other on the surface, the connection was apparently inevitable through the linking of both kinds of victims with poor, besieged Africa. Moreover, both stories launched on social media, which has a new power to set the agenda for public discourse. Almost immediately, Twitter hashtags appeared that played off the #BlackLivesMatter movement, #IfCecilWasBlack and #AllLionsMatter. Social media today, like electricity in 1900, represents both the leading edge of technological progress and an unpredictable force that lends a thrilling jolt to the event itself.

Here too, the trophy of Cecil’s missing head calls forth the memory of white colonial power, and the spoils brought home to exhibit in zoos or hang over the fireplace. It did not help Walter Palmer’s case that he happened to be a middle-aged white man who had paid $50,000 to shoot a lion in a country where three-quarters of the population lives in poverty. The racial undertones were even more pronounced because of President Barack Obama’s nearly simultaneous visit to Kenya. News reports made much of this visit to his father’s homeland as the first ever by a sitting American president, and Obama announced upon arrival that he would implement new measures to cut off the ivory trade, which is decimating the African elephant population. Obama, Africa, and big game thus became interchangeable in our awareness, since Obama is both the King of Beasts (as president), and vulnerable to assassination as a black man. Tied in to the emotional mix is the ongoing debate about gun rights in America, and the shooting of innocent people by crazed gunmen. Immediately after the news of Cecil broke, photos resurfaced on the Internet of Donald Trump’s sons posing with dead African game, including Donald Jr. holding a knife and bloody elephant tail. Trump Sr., the multi-billionaire Republican presidential candidate, said pointedly in their defense that while he himself does not hunt, he is “a big believer in the Second Amendment” and that his sons are proud members of the NRA. A long history of frustrated attempts to limit gun violence in America clearly played into the loud calls to put an end to trophy hunting. Walter Palmer was a hunter, not a psychopathic killer, yet his heartless slaughter of an innocent creature put him in the same category in critics’ minds as a crazed gunman who would open fire on schoolchildren. Guns, white men, police brutality, and innocent victims all got thrown into the social media stew.

Outside observers were quick to point out the hypocrisy in the Western outrage over Cecil. Goodwell Nzou of Zimbabwe wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece that it was “an absurdist circus,” incomprehensible to Africans, “the American tendency to romanticize animals that have been given actual names and to jump onto a hashtag train.” He said his countrymen were stunned to see Americans more concerned about African animals than African people, and noted the hypocrisy of a nation that allows its own top predators to be hunted to near extinction. The famous primatologist Jane Goodall, while criticizing trophy hunting, echoed many animal advocates’ puzzlement when she asked in her blog if it was worse to shoot animals than to imprison them in a factory farm, and worse to grant hunting licenses than to pull the trigger. Clearly, it was Cecil’s singular fame (though most Americans had never heard of him before) that put him in the same category with cultural icons like Disney’s Lion King and Elsa of Born Free, sparking an outpouring of grief. Named individuals arouse vastly more interest and sympathy than collective groups, whether animal or human. Meanwhile, hundreds of African lions are killed each year by trophy hunters, a majority of whom are Americans—some 15,000 who go on African hunting safaris annually, according to the group Conservation Force. Safari hunting generates $40 million a year for Zimbabwe, and many believe the government is complicit in widespread poaching.

Here at home, it also makes no sense to be outraged over Cecil’s death while ignoring the millions of animals killed each day for food, scientific research, or sport. Rupert Myers spoke for many when he wrote in The Telegraph, “It is easier to damn [Palmer] for his disgusting vanity than to address our own failings. But on behalf of less cute animals everywhere, whose miserable deaths occur thanks to deforestation, pollution and unreasonably high demands for protein, I think it’s time to shut up already about this stupid dentist.” It’s easy to jump on the blame train when we belong to a society that benefits from animal exploitation, most of which we are powerless to prevent. It’s morally satisfying, especially for the guilty, to point the finger at one rich white man who was caught frittering away a fortune on a phony safari.

What the stories of Topsy and Cecil share in common is a bizarre moment in a new century where an animal is given human status—one as a perpetrator, the other as a victim of crime—in a kind of mass delusion that no one seems to find overly strange. The angry mob of the previous century has become the angry mob on social media, which uses verbal ammunition in place of stones and riots. But unlike the hanging-day crowds of the 1900s, social-media demands for justice have not been satisfied, especially in police killings of black victims. This may be one reason why the outrage was greater for LionLives than BlackLives, despite how critics portrayed it. Frustration with police killings helped fuel rage over the lion killing, as Walter Palmer made for a clear, simple target compared with the culture of policing in America. Our helpless anger over all kinds of injustices—from gun violence to discrimination to animal abuse to unequal wealth—seemed to coalesce around this one easy target, which also helped mask our complicity in countless other forms of animal cruelty. Karen Houle, a philosophy professor at the University of Guelph, suggested in an online discussion about Cecil that animal suffering has a unique ability to pierce the armor we build around ourselves against the growing tide of multiple daily traumas. Animal stories may breach “a kind of collective disgust for ourselves through a moment of recognition,” she wrote, “of a fleshy, fleeting existence on earth, and the vulnerability to everything.” In the days and weeks after the Cecil story broke, we were told that good could come of the senseless tragedy if we turned our grief and anger to the fight against trophy hunting, poaching, habitat loss, poverty and injustice in Africa. But these exhortations rang hollow, satisfying neither frustrated vengeance nor the measure of our anguish. Our feeling for Cecil began and ended with Cecil himself, a lion most of us never knew but for the depth of our identification with him. If Victorian audiences obsessed with social violations projected these repressed self-images onto “the elephant in the room,” it is clear why Topsy, Murderous Mary, and others had to pay the price to keep the peace and calm the crowd. Today, our attitudes have shifted so much that the death of one lion half a world away can set off a mass outpouring of anger and sorrow. The shift is significant: After centuries of calling “beastly” all that is potentially evil and criminal within us, today the beast has come to embody all that was once innocent and free, but is now lost and desperately grieved.