What killed Cecil Lion?  Was it the weapons used or the power of money and cheapening of life?   

Do legalities make our morals or is it the converse?  How do we balance the morality and immorality of what we want?   Is it based upon what others will tolerate, and is tolerance a moral position?   Aren’t we meant to tolerate the freedom of others to do what is legal, or do we need to wait for the court of public opinion to change the law with protest and unrest – ultimately to apply Cecil’s law, to the wider law – whereby the ethical failures of the law reduce us to the law of the jungle?  

But in what jungle do we frame our laws?  Cecil may not be human, yet his natural nobility makes an ass of any law to legitimate our ignoble exploitations.  And what law of nature gives dominion over the beasts to an animal that is more deadly than the wild?  

Mike Laidler