Kyle Potter, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tuesday, September 8, 2015 1:25:02 EDT PM



BLOOMINGTON, Minn. -- The Minnesota dentist who killed Cecil the lion returned to work Tuesday after weeks away, walking silently past a swarm of media and a handful of protesters outside his small dental practice calling for him to be sent to Zimbabwe to face trial.

A security guard met Palmer in the parking lot of the Bloomington clinic as he walked from a street where police had blocked off traffic, whisking him inside past a barrage of reporters shouting questions.

Palmer announced Sunday in an interview with The Associated Press -- his first since the uproar broke over Cecil's killing during a hunt in Zimbabwe's vast Hwange National Park in July -- that he would return to work, saying his patients and staff need him.

The small throng of protesters gathered outside the clinic didn't match the furor in the days after Palmer was named as Cecil's killer, when hundreds held vigils for the big cat with the black mane and forced River Bluff Dental to temporarily close.

Just a few protesters were on site when the dentist appeared shortly after 7 a.m. Cathy Pierce repeatedly yelled "Extradite Palmer!" as he entered the practice.

Pierce said she drove more than an hour from her home in East Bethel to the Bloomington clinic to "fight for animals who can't fight for themselves."

She scoffed at Palmer's suggestion in his interview with the AP that protesters had unfairly targeted his employees and family, in some cases threatening violence.

"We're not picking on his staff or his family. We're picking on him," she said. "We want him to know that we're not going to forget."

Stephanie Michaelis, a woman who lives near the clinic, walked over to argue with protesters, telling them to leave Palmer alone. She said the uproar over Cecil's death was overblown and that people should be more concerned about abortions and threats to human life.

Among the patients Tuesday was Thomas Dressel, who said his wife was a regular but it was his first visit as a patient. Dressel said he trusted Palmer's account of the hunt and, as a retired doctor, wanted to support a fellow medical professional.

"I support his business. I'm sure that this has really hurt his practice," he said.

Bloomington Police Deputy Chief Mike Hartley said police would be there as long as media were gathered. He said police don't believe Palmer's safety is at risk.

A group of half a dozen protesters remained on the sidewalk more than an hour after Palmer entered, holding signs calling for his extradition to Zimbabwe to face punishment. But while Palmer's guides on the hunt have either been charged or await charges for their involvement in Cecil's killing, the Zimbabwean government's pursuit of the dentist has cooled off amid fears it could hamper a hunting industry that is lucrative and important for the country.

It's been a month since Zimbabwean officials announced that police would process paperwork to extradite Palmer for participating in the hunt, but as of Monday, a police spokeswoman in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, said there were no new developments in the case.

An attorney acting on Palmer's behalf told AP that he offered to make Palmer available to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to talk about the case several weeks ago, but he hasn't heard back.

Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Laury Parramore said Tuesday that she has no update on the case but that an investigation continues.

Whether I agree with it or not...I don't get why this made news when it's been going on for a while now.

Good question. But it is still news :)

he killed a kitty cat...shame on him... shooting defenseless bambi is ok, but kill a 500 pound wild cat?

Hey...deer meat is yummy

yes, i agree... never ate any lion tho...

Dear meat does taste ok (not my favorite) but dear are not endangered.

neither are lions...

Dude needed security???? Come on man. You killed a lion. Surely you can handle a small mob of leftist protestors.

Well, someone must have. Haven't you heard of a man eating lion?

yea, they might throw some paint on the lions head...

True but they are listed as vulnerable . Conservation groups do want them listed as endangered.

yea, but nobody listens to PETA anyway... there are plenty of lions in Africa, the herds of wilderbeast, zebra's and antelopes are in the millions... last i read, there's 20-30 thousand just in Africa alone...

cheetahs and tigers are about to die off, not lions

http://www.westernjournalism.com/a-zimbabwean-just-dropped-a-truth-bomb-about-cecil-the-lion-that-americans-need-to-see/

A Zimbabwean Just Dropped A Truth Bomb About Cecil The Lion That Americans Need To See

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LBmUwi6mEo

Here is a dated article in National Geographic



Lion Conservation

Living With Lions

When people and lions collide, both suffer.

By David Quammen

Photograph by Brent Stirton


Lions are complicated creatures, magnificent at a distance yet fearsomely inconvenient to the rural peoples whose fate is to live among them. They are lords of the wild savanna but inimical to pastoralism and incompatible with farming. So it’s no wonder their fortunes have trended downward for as long as human civilization has been trending up.

There’s evidence across at least three continents of the lions’ glory days and their decline. Chauvet Cave, in southern France, filled with vivid Paleolithic paintings of wildlife, shows us that lions inhabited Europe along with humans 30 millennia ago; the Book of Daniel suggests that lions lurked at the outskirts of Babylon in the sixth century B.C.; and there are reports of lions surviving in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran until well into the 19th or 20th centuries. Africa alone, during this long ebb, remained the reliable heartland.

But that has changed too. New surveys and estimates suggest that the lion has disappeared from about 80 percent of its African range. No one knows how many lions survive today in Africa—as many as 35,000?—because wild lions are difficult to count. Experts agree, though, that just within recent decades the overall total has declined significantly. The causes are multiple—including habitat loss and fragmentation, poaching of lion prey for bush meat, poachers’ snares that catch lions instead, displacement of lion prey by livestock, disease, spearing or poisoning of lions in retaliation for livestock losses and attacks upon humans, ritual killing of lions (notably within the Maasai tradition), and unsustainable trophy hunting for lions, chiefly by affluent Americans.

The new assessments, compiled by scientists from Panthera (an international felid conservation group), Duke University, the National Geographic Society’s Big Cats Initiative, and elsewhere, indicate that African lions now live in nearly 70 distinct areas (view map), the largest and most secure of which can be considered strongholds. But the smallest contain only tiny populations, isolated, genetically limited, and lacking viability for the long term. In other words, the African lion inhabits an archipelago of insular refuges, and more than a few of those marooned populations may soon go extinct.

What can be done to stanch the losses and reverse the trend? Some experts say we should focus efforts on the strongholds, such as the Serengeti ecosystem (spanning Tanzania to Kenya), the Selous ecosystem (southeastern Tanzania), the Ruaha-Rungwa (western Tanzania), the Okavango-Hwange (Botswana into Zimbabwe), and the Greater Limpopo (at the shared corners of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, including Kruger National Park). Those five ecosystems alone account for roughly half of Africa’s lions, and each contains a genetically viable population. Craig Packer has offered a drastic suggestion for further protecting some strongholds: Fence them, or at least some of their margins. Investing conservation dollars in chain-link and posts, combined with adequate levels of patrolling and repair, he argues, is the best way to limit illegal entry into protected areas by herders, their livestock, and poachers, as well as reckless exit from those areas by lions.

Other experts strongly disagree. In fact, this fencing idea goes against three decades of conservation theory, which stresses the importance of connectedness among habitat patches. Packer knows that, and even he wouldn’t put a fence across any valuable route of wildlife dispersal or migration. But consider, for instance, the western boundary of the Serengeti ecosystem, where the Maswa Game Reserve meets the Sukuma agricultural lands beyond. If you fly over that area at low elevation, you’ll see the boundary as a stark edge, delineated by the slash of a red clay road. East of it lies the rolling green terrain of Maswa, covered with acacia woodlands and lush savanna, a virtual extension of Serengeti National Park. West of the road, in the Sukuma zone, you’ll look down on mile after mile of cotton fields, cornfields, teams of oxen plowing bare dirt, paddies, and brown-and-white cows standing in pens. A fence along that boundary, as Packer asserts, could do no harm and possibly some good. It may be a special case, but it’s enough to open a heated discussion.

Trophy hunting is also controversial. Does it contribute to population declines because of irresponsible overharvesting? Or does it effectively monetize the lion, bringing cash into local and national economies and providing an incentive for habitat protection and sustainable long-term management? The answer depends—on particulars of place, on which lions are targeted (old males or young ones), and on the integrity of management, both by the hunting operator and by the national wildlife agency. Certainly there are abuses—countries in which hunting concessions are granted corruptly, situations in which little or no hunting income reaches the local people who pay the real costs of living amid lions, concessions on which too many lions are killed. But in places such as Maswa Game Reserve—where hunts are scrupulously managed in cooperation with the Friedkin Conservation Fund, an organization that cares more about habitat protection than about revenue—the effect of a ban on hunting would be perverse.

Hunting of captive-bred lions released into fenced areas on private ranches, as now widely practiced in South Africa, raises a whole different set of questions. In a recent year 174 such lion-breeding ranches operated in the country, with a combined stock of more than 3,500 lions. Proponents argue that this industry may contribute to lion conservation by diverting trophy-hunt pressure from wild populations and by maintaining genetic diversity that could be needed later. Others fear it may undercut the economics of lion management in, say, Tanzania, by offering cheaper and easier ways to put a lion head on your rec-room wall.

And then there’s the matter of what happens to the rest of the lion. The export of lion bones from South Africa to Asia, where they are sold as an alternative to tiger bones, constitutes a dangerous trend that surely increases demand.

Bottom line: Lion conservation is an intricate enterprise that must now reach across borders, across oceans, and across disciplines to confront a global market in dreams of the wild.

But conservation begins at home, among people for whom the sublime and terrifying wildness of a lion is no dream. One set of such people are the Maasai who inhabit group ranches bordering Amboseli National Park, on the thornbush plains of southern Kenya. Since 2007 a program there called Lion Guardians has recruited Maasai warriors—young men for whom lion killing has traditionally been part of a rite of passage known as olamayio—to serve instead as lion protectors. These men, paid salaries, trained in radiotelemetry and GPS use, track lions on a daily basis and prevent lion attacks on livestock. The program, small but astute, seems to be succeeding: Lion killings have decreased, and the role of Lion Guardian is now prestigious within those communities.

I spent a day recently with a Lion Guardian named Kamunu, roughly 30 years old, serious and steady, whose dark face tapered to a narrow chin and whose eyes seemed permanently squinted against sentiment and delusion. He wore a beaded necklace, beaded earrings, and a red shuka wrapped around him; a Maasai dagger was sheathed on his belt at one side, a cell phone at the other. Kamunu had personally killed five lions, he told me, all for olamayio, but he didn’t intend to kill any more. He had learned that lions could be more valuable alive—in money from tourism, wages from Lion Guardians, and the food and education such cash could buy for a man’s family.

We walked a long circuit that very hot day, winding through acacia bush, crossing a dry riverbed, Kamunu following lion spoor in the dust and me following him. Probably we traipsed about 16 miles. In the morning we tracked a lone adult, recognizable to Kamunu from its big pug as a certain problematic male. When we met a long line of cows headed for water, their bells clanking, attended by several Maasai boys, Kamunu warned the boys to stay clear of that lion.

Around midday he picked up a different trail, very fresh, left by a female with two cubs. We saw her flattened day bed in the herbage beneath a bush. We traced her sinuous route into a grove of scrubby myrrh trees that grew thicker as we went. Kamunu moved quietly. Finally we stopped. I saw nothing but vegetation and dirt.

They’re very close, he explained. This is a good spot. No livestock nearby. We don’t want to push any closer. We don’t want to disturb them. No, we don’t, I agreed.

“We think they are safe here,” he told me. It’s more than can be said for many African lions, but at that moment, in that place, it was enough.

Contributing writer David Quammen received the 2012 Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution. Documentary photographer Brent Stirton’s October 2012 elephant-ivory story won the POY Environmental Vision Award.

National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative is dedicated to halting the decline of lions and other big cats around the world. To learn more about the projects we support, visit causeanuproar.org.

op as far as I know the dentist broke other laws ...in the pass with something to do with his big game hunting ...


what is so difference
Cecil In June 2015, Walter Palmer, an American dentist and recreational game hunter from Minnesota, reportedly paid US$50,000 to a professional hunter / guide, Theo Bronkhorst, to enable him to kill a lion.



(Cecil was allegedly lured out of the sanctuary where he was shot and wounded with an arrow.)

He was tracked, and approximately 40 hours later was killed with a rifle. He was then skinned and his head was removed. When his headless skeleton was found by park investigators, his tracking collar was missing.



I am going to say yes ...their are people who love killing wild animals for sport and hang their heads on walls of their homes ...for trophies ... personalty do not agree ... shooting wild innocent animals seems really immature to me ... its like wow look what I did and these people that admires this sport has no compassion for animals ... and think the large amount of money to do this... can be used in more useful ways then this ... but it was the luring of Cecil out of his own sanctuary an what broke the laws ...and was wrong and inhumane ...

This brings home a lot of truths
Living up here in Alaska and hearing people idealize that cute wild dog that they call Wolf.. Or the snuggly wuggly Brown bear.

We deal with being careful in all that we do up here. It is a fact of life for us.
They way the lion was made to suffer is my anger issue.