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Stupid. They should just make the guy pay a fine and that's it.
End of the day, it's only an animal.
Palmer can now safely return to Zimbabwe as a "tourist" because he had not broken the southern African country's hunting laws, Environment, Water and Climate Minister Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri told reporters in Harare on Monday. Zimbabwe's police and the National Prosecuting Authority had cleared Palmer of wrongdoing, she said. Palmer was identified as the man who killed Cecil in a bow hunt. Cecil, a resident of Hwange National park in western Zimbabwe, was well-known to tourists and researchers for his distinctive black mane.
Dentist Walter Palmer, arrives back at his office following a lunch break in Bloomington, Minn. A Zimbabwe Cabinet minister said Monday Oct. 12, 2015 that the country is no longer pressing for Palmer's extradition following the hunting and killing a well-known lion called Cecil.
Muchinguri-Kashiri had said in July that Zimbabwean police and prosecutors would work to get Palmer returned to Zimbabwe to face poaching charges. On Monday, she told reporters in Harare that Palmer can now safely return to Zimbabwe as a "tourist" because he had not broken this wildlife-rich southern African country's hunting laws. "He is free to come, not for hunting, but as a tourist," Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri told reporters. "It turned out that Palmer came to Zimbabwe because all the papers were in order."
Palmer was the subject of extradition talk in Zimbabwe and a target of protests in the United States, particularly in Minnesota, where he has a dental practice, after he was identified as the man who killed Cecil the lion in a bow hunt. Cecil was a resident of Hwange National Park in western Zimbabwe. Messages left Monday with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which was handling a U.S. investigation into Palmer, were not immediately returned. Theo Bronkhorst, a Zimbabwean professional hunter who was a guide for Palmer, returned to court last week on charges of allowing an illegal hunt. His lawyer Perpetua Dube argued that the charges are too vague and should be dropped.
News from The Associated Press
Three years of searching and no sight of a lion for Philipp Henschel, lion survey coordinator for the New York-based Panthera conservation group. Then he saw it, his first lion in West Africa. And in of all places, Nigeria. "It came as a big surprise because Nigeria has by far the biggest human population on the continent, and the national parks are fairly small compared to others in West Africa that already have lost their lions," Henschel told The Associated Press. "Everyone was excited, including rangers from Nigeria's National Park Service - it was the first time they had seen one too."
That was in 2009. The count was depressing: 25 to 30 lions left in Kainji Lake National Park in west-central Nigeria and only about five in the east-central Yankari National Park. Three years earlier, Nigerian conservationists had reported lions present in six protected areas, but they had apparently disappeared in four of them, Henschel said. Henschel has gone on to survey all 21 protected areas believed to harbor lions in West Africa. He has seen only nine lions in four reserves, including Senegal's Niokolo-Koba National Park and the trans-frontier Pendjari and Arli National Parks of Benin and Burkina Faso.
His research, published last year, reported that lions no longer exist in 99 percent of their historic range in West Africa - a finding that prompted the International Union for Conservation of Nature to put the lions of West Africa on its Red List as critically endangered. The situation is dire in much of Africa. New research published Monday shows sharp declines since 1990 in nearly all lion populations in West and Central Africa, and that both regions risk losing half their lions within the next two decades. East Africa stands a 37 percent chance of halving its lion population over the same period, according to the survey published in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and written by researchers including Henschel.
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