The hue and cry over Cecil the lion’s killing is yet to die down. Zimbabwe’s most popular lion’s death did stir up outrage in the quarters of animals rights crusaders and much indignation at how a ‘man who restores lives’ could take the life of another. While the need for a better conservation-hunting model has risen yet again and efforts are on to chalk out more effective regulation on hunting, the focus returns to how man-habitat-animal conflicts abet loss of lives. More interesting are the isolated voices that call animals in the wild just what they are – “killers”.

Circumstances of the death of Cecil, a 13-year-old lion popular with tourists at Hwange National Park and being studied by scientists, are well known. Shot with an arrow after a dead animal was allegedly used to draw him out of his sanctuary, Cecil was tracked for 40 hours before being shot with a gun, skinned and beheaded. Walter Palmer, the American dentist who admitted killing Cecil, expressed regret, saying he relied on local guides and thought the hunt was legal. Officials in Zimbabwe and the United States are investigating.

What must not get lost in the hunt for justice for one celebrity lion is that Cecil’s death is part of a larger problem. The decline in population of African lions has been dramatic, from 500,000 to 600,000 at the turn of the 20th century to about 30,000 today. Other animals — elephants, rhinoceros, apes — are in equal, sometimes greater, danger. The Post’s Kevin Sieff pointed upthe contrast in attention between Cecil’s killing and that of five nameless elephants slaughtered in Kenya by poachers marketing in ivory.

Hunting, legal and illegal, has not been the main cause of the decline in animal populations; that honor goes to the encroachment of civilization on natural habitats. Indeed, some hunting enthusiasts even argue that trophy hunting can be a boon to conservation by generating big fees to support sanctuaries, attract tourists and discourage local residents from killing animals or taking over their habitats.

And this Opinion piece in The New York Times captures yet another voice: of people who’ve lost lives and limbs to the ilk of Cecil.

Don’t misunderstand me: For Zimbabweans, wild animals have near-mystical significance. We belong to clans, and each clan claims an animal totem as its mythological ancestor. Mine is Nzou, elephant, and by tradition, I can’t eat elephant meat; it would be akin to eating a relative’s flesh. But our respect for these animals has never kept us from hunting them or allowing them to be hunted. (I’m familiar with dangerous animals; I lost my right leg to a snakebite when I was 11.)

The American tendency to romanticize animals that have been given actual names and to jump onto a hashtag train has turned an ordinary situation — there were 800 lions legally killed over a decade by well-heeled foreigners who shelled out serious money to prove their prowess — into what seems to my Zimbabwean eyes an absurdist circus.

PETA is calling for the hunter to be hanged. Zimbabwean politicians are accusing the United States of staging Cecil’s killing as a “ploy” to make our country look bad. And Americans who can’t find Zimbabwe on a map are applauding the nation’s demand for the extradition of the dentist, unaware that a baby elephant was reportedly slaughtered for our president’s most recent birthday banquet.

We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.Don’t tell us what to do with our animals when you allowed your own mountain lions to be hunted to near extinction in the eastern United States. Don’t bemoan the clear-cutting of our forests when you turned yours into concrete jungles.

And please, don’t offer me condolences about Cecil unless you’re also willing to offer me condolences for villagers killed or left hungry by his brethren, by political violence, or by hunger.

Read more here.