A Poacher, a Radio Collar, and the Ecology of Outrage
In the fall of 2015, research data from a GPS collar was the smoking gun in a global scandal centered on a lion named Cecil.
Here’s what Jimmy Kimmel — in a surprisingly graphic monologue — told his audiences on TV, Hulu, YouTube, and abc.com:
It was a dentist from Minnesota who paid $50,000 to shoot the lion… He hired a company… They tied a dead animal to the back of a jeep to lure the lion out of the park…
[T]hey put a spotlight on him, and then the dentist shot Cecil with a bow and arrow. But the arrow didn’t kill the lion, so they tracked him and 40 hours later, shot him with a gun, skinned him, and took the head and left the body there.
Now, unfortunately for them, the researchers at Oxford who were tracking Cecil were able to trace the signal and find the carcass...
One of those researchers, Andrew Loveridge, told me how the monologue added fuel to a controversy that was already growing exponentially. In the 24 hours following the broadcast, more than 4.4 million people visited his research center’s website.
The scandal had begun shortly after the killing, as a conversation among local guides on social media. Eventually, it caught the attention of news editors and broadcasters, whose reports reached their audiences across the world and spread even further on social media. Kimmel’s monologue spread the story to an even wider audience and transformed into a secondary news event. The next morning, sites across the internet ran headlines like Jimmy Kimmel breaks down over Cecil the lion death.
According to an analysis by Loveridge and others, news media published more than 95,000 articles between July and September, and social media users posted nearly 700k messages.
“It was an absolutely astonishing level of attention for one animal,” said Loveridge, a senior research fellow at Oxford who now works for a conservation organization called Panthera. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen that in conservation.”
Panthera has been sending me press releases for years. When their PR agency pitched Loveridge as a source for stories about the tenth anniversary of the Cecil moment, I asked for his side of the story.
How did you first encounter Cecil?
He was part of a research project I helped set up about 25 years ago to study a poorly known population of lions in western Zimbabwe. Cecil turned up in our study area around 2008, and I caught and put a collar on him. He happened to live in a popular area for photographic tourism, and he was popular with guides and their guests. People knew him for his black mane.
Were you surprised when you realized he had been killed?
That wasn’t such an unusual thing for us. Many of the 200 lions that we’ve studied have died, often from human-related causes. For whatever reason — and I’m not sure I understand the reason — it became this huge media event.
How did this not-so-unusual incident come to global attention?
Initially, there was a lot of anger at a local level. Cecil was a favorite. The photographic safari guides often work in the same area for a long time. They suddenly lost this fantastic animal they had gotten attached to and that their guests enjoyed photographing.
Guides were writing things like “someone struck Cecil” on social media. Eventually, it spilled over and became a bit of a sensation. A lot of the attention was fueled by celebrities, particularly Jimmy Kimmel. When he spoke about it on his show, that created the media storm.
What was the ultimate outcome of getting so much attention focused on lion conservation and your study area?
I think that publicity was good for lion conservation in that it drew the public's attention to the plight of lions. There are only about 24,000 left in the heart of Africa, and they've declined probably by about 75% since the 1970s. Cecil mobilized a lot more support for lion conservation and a lot more funding, which has allowed us to do more work. Some of these lion populations are likely to go extinct if we don't do anything.
Would you hope for another moment of massive media attention?
I'm not sure that we necessarily would want that kind of over-the-top attention again. Overall, I'm not sure that's actually helpful for conservation. For one thing, African countries choose to manage their wildlife in a certain way, and very often that's partly through trophy hunting. Understandably, they are sensitive to the criticism that comes with that. Because we very strongly partner with management agencies in those countries, I don't think it's necessarily helpful to have that sort of tension.
Did the firestorm of criticism end up causing problems for your research and conservation work?
Not really. We’ve been working closely with the national authorities for a long time. I think they were actually a bit bemused by the explosion of media attention: Why do we care about a lion more than we care about people who are starving? Or the people who are injured by wildlife, including by lions?