Anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account last week couldn’t avoid hearing about Walter James Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who allegedly went trophy hunting in Zimbabwe and killed Cecil the Lion, a local favorite who had been illegally lured away from a protected wildlife preserve. I won’t say anything more about it, other than that you can sign a petition to get Palmer extradited to Zimbabwe and let him defend his actions to local authorities.
Meanwhile, back in New York City, two artists Travis Threlkel and Louie Psihoyos were getting ready to turn The Empire State building into a Noah’s Ark of Endangered Animals. And that’s exactly what happened on Saturday night. Placing “40 stacked, 20,000-lumen projectors on the roof of a nearby building,” Threlkel and Psihoyos projected an array of endangered animals “onto a space 375 feet tall and 186 feet wide covering 33 floors,” reports The New York Times. You can see photos of the animals over at the Racing Extinction Twitter stream. Touchingly, there was an homage to Cecil the Lion. A video from the Times appears above; another from The New Yorker below.
To learn more about how Project Mapping works, and to see other examples of Threlkel’s work, see the videos on this page.
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What of the entire herd of gazelle, Cecil (the serical killer) wiped out, there was, Grace the gazelle, Gabriella the gazelle,Genevieve the gazelle,giselle the gazelle, Gloria the gazelle, Gina the gazelle, Gia the gazelle, Giada (And she could surely cook!) the gazelle, and a host of others, all to be forgotten.
O, so do you think the late Cecil killed them for trophy hunting and fun like the highly educated American dentist, Sky?
It would behoove those who would jump to extradite someone to Zimbabwe over the death of a lion to exercise some judgment. Do the “petitioners” have any idea what kind of laws exist in Zimbabwe and whether a truly fair trial would occur there? I wonder whether the petitioners even care. No doubt these same people, who feel such empathy for an animal, take no umbrage over the ending of a human baby’s life before it reaches term. We live in an increasingly morally upside-down world.
The citizens of Zimbabwe consider lions a deadly predator that steals their food and kills their children. When animals are hunted for trophy the rest of the animal is donated to local villages as food. When the citizens of Zimbabwe were asked how they felt about America getting involved in the current debate they were excited because they thought they were being helped (Zimbabwe suffers from 30% unemployment). When they found out it was about Cecil the Lion, they said, “Who? Who cares about a lion?” I hope we don’t make ourselves look stupid. We don’t need another suffering country to view Americans as callous and ignorant. On the other hand, nice display ESB!