Black Rhino

In 2014, Texas businessman Corey Knowlton paid $350,000 to kill an endangered black rhino. A year later, and more infamously, a Minnesota dentist named Walter Palmer shot Cecil, a much-beloved African lion. Though the circumstances differ, the initial reaction to the two cases was almost identical. The British comic Ricky Gervais labelled the killers ‘murdering scum’. A little searching on YouTube reveals more colourful responses. Various people scream at the camera, ‘How fucking demented this motherfucker is!’ and ‘May you fucking burn to death!’ Elsewhere one person threatened to kill Knowlton’s parents and ‘rape his wife to death’. Another wrote, ‘I hope the rhino rips you in half. Do your children know what a monster their father is? I hope you get what you deserve: a short and painful existence.’ Knowlton recalls one threat in particular: ‘I’m coming to your house. I’m gonna burn it down. I’m gonna put your kids in a woodchipper. And I’m gonna do it in front of you.’ Compared to these, Ricky Gervais is a model of calm reasonableness. All of which leads to a question that may seem too obvious to bother asking. Here we could have had an important discussion about the practice of hunting: why did it go so badly?