As the world knows, Cecil the lion met a sad ending recently, shot and then skinned and beheaded for the pleasure of an American dentist from Minnesota, who wanted a King of the Jungle to hang on his wall. All very sad, and the outrage erupted in the all the right places.
But imagine a different end for a very young Cecil, who is about to emerge from the womb of his mother when a white huntress appears. Call her “Cecile,” and give her Claire Underwood’s haircut, along with Claire Underwood’s well-known lack of concern for the lives and well-being of others, such as journalists who ask unsettling questions, congressmen who drink and chase women and other life forms of lesser importance who happen to get in her way.
“Cecile” scoops Cecil up, sees he gets “crushed” in all the right places, rips his heart out to sell on the market and tosses his sad little body away. Cue wrath, rage and tears from the usual suspects. But change Cecil the little boy lion to Cecil the little boy, period, and the wrath, rage and tears disappear. Animal rights groups are sadly indifferent to the concerns of small animals who aren’t the right species. But don’t they know we belong to the Animal Kingdom? And isn’t it time they expanded their sights?
Here’s an idea. Merge People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals with the Right to Life movement. Call it People for the Ethical Treatment and Right to Life of All Kinds of Animals, and spread the protests around. Right to Life people will protest in front of kill shelters and food processing plants, and PETA will protest in front of the kill shelter known as Planned Parenthood. Soon, they might find they have something in common.
In fact, some people think that they have.
“Enraged over Cecil the Lion? It may help you understand the rage over Planned Parenthood,” says Charles Camosy, professor of Bioethics at Fordham, who finds the motivations of animal rights and right to life people to be really quite similar, stemming from an urge to shelter the helpless from exploitation and violence, and thinks that these groups, instead of fighting each other, could seek out and find common ground.
This is the “seamless garment” theory, often used to align the movements against abortion and capital punishment, minus the problem that many criminals have committed horrible actions, and may have deserved a death sentence. And aside from killing and eating their prey (which would apply, of course, to poor Cecil), very few fetuses and not many furry or feathery creatures have been convicted of committing a crime.
And so on the right side a number of red-meat conservatives have been finding their kinder and gentler natures, even to the point of not eating red meat. “Conservative circles in Washington and New York include a growing number of like-minded animal softies, ranging from mindful carnivores to all-the-way vegans,” says Mary Eberstadt, citing herself and Jonathan Last among others who have become vegetarians. “The momentum in conservative and traditionalist circles toward a consistent ethic of life is arising not by accident in an age of omnipresent abortion — but on account of it. … They are people who see in animal cruelty not just an episodic act but a gateway drug to the culture of death in itself.”
Can Cecilistas man up to the challenge? They can tell themselves that they’ll do it for Cecil. Cecil himself was once a fetus. Cecil would want it that way.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
