Cecil the lion, proving just how much the world loves big cats and hates dentists. If your Facebook news feed hasn’t been clogged up with outpourings of love for the murdered animal then congrats, you must have very few friends.

So how have the Zimbabwean government and citizens reacted to the world’s eyes being trained on them? If you ask Reuters and the folks they spoke to not very well it would seem:

“What lion?” acting information minister Prisca Mupfumira asked in response to a request for comment about Cecil, who was at that moment topping global news bulletins and generating reams of abuse for his killer…

The government has still given no formal response, and on Thursday the papers that chose to run the latest twist in the Cecil saga tucked it away on inside pages.

One title had to rely on foreign news agency copy because it failed to send a reporter to the court appearance of two locals involved.

I have a feeling that they may have been rather generous with the title of information minister there. The people on the streets then:

“Are you saying that all this noise is about a dead lion? Lions are killed all the time in this country,” said Tryphina Kaseke, a used-clothes hawker on the streets of Harare. “What is so special about this one?”

As unpopular as it to say yes, what is so special about Cecil? His murder was a disgusting act of poaching but perhaps, whilst the world gawks at Zimbabwe, they should also look at the root cause of what has led to incidents such as these. Here’s TIME:

Until 2000 Zimbabwe had a successful wildlife-management program, with many big-game animals flourishing. But by 2003, a staggering 80% of the animals that had lived on Zimbabwean safari camps (which employed firm quotas to regulate animal population sizes) had died. By 2007, there were only 14 private game farms in the country, compared with 620 prior to the land seizures of 2000…With the protection of private game reserves nearly nonexistent, once abundant wildlife began dying off, hunted by desperate farmers with no other options for sustenance.

Despite the passing of harsher laws for poachers in 2011 illegal hunting in Zimbabwe is still big business. Poaching syndicates earn hundreds of thousands of dollars exporting ivory and animal skins. Many conservationists believe allowing the community to reap the benefits of wildlife management — by, ironically, running the sorts of safaris on which Palmer shot his lion — will help curb illegal poaching. But it is impossible to have that debate while the world brays for the ruin of a lone Minnesotan dentist, and fails to criticize a regime whose policies were responsible for the almost complete extinction of Zimbabwean wildlife in the first place.

Just a though. Walter Palmer is still a cretin for wanting to mount Cecil’s head on his wall to feel like a big man, but a certain dictator and his lack of anything resembling foresight should perhaps be viewed as the biggest villain of all.

[sources:reuters&time]