Angry About Cecil the Lion's Death? Take It Out on the Republican Congress

As outrage spread online over a Minnesota dentist’s alleged poaching of a beloved lion in Zimbabwe, Democratic Representative Raul Grijalva saw a convenient political opportunity. “This sort of incident is why we have endangered species laws and why Republicans need to start taking their enforcement seriously,” the Arizona congressman said in a statement released Tuesday. This may seem like typical Washington politicking, but he's right: Americans who worry about the fate of African lions ought to point fingers at the Republican-controlled Congress. Most of the fury thus far has targeted Walter Palmer, and for good reason: He and two Zimbabweans allegedly used bait to lure the 13-year-old lion out of a national park, where Cecil was protected, and into territory where lion hunting is legal. There, Palmer reportedly wounded Cecil with a bow, then stalked him for nearly two days before finally killing him with a rifle, decapitating and skinning him, and leaving the corpse to “rot in the sun.” The two Zimbabweans he hired, to the reported tune of $50,000, have been arrested and arraigned...It’s tempting to think that, had the FWS simply acted more quickly, Cecil would never have ended up on a Midwestern dentist’s mantle. But the bureaucratic backlog of the endangered species listing process cannot be understood outside of the context of a deliberate, years-long Republican campaign to prevent the FWS from doing its job. According to a study published Tuesday by the Center for Biological Diversity, the last four years have seen an “unprecedented Republican attack on endangered species,” a coordinated rollback strategy fueled by special-interest lobbying and the right-wing’s broader war on environmental science. Compared to the previous 15 years, the study found a sixfold increase since 2011 in the number of legislative attempts to gut the ESA and hamper the FWS’ ability to apply its protections...more