Lion-killing dentist is getting all the shame he deserves on the Internet

As has been widely reported in the media by now, Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer is a big-time game hunter, and he travels around the world to shoot big game with a bow and arrow. He can, of course, do whatever he wants as long as he can afford it. But now, in conjunction with his big game guides, to whom he paid more than $50,000, Palmer lured a lion named Cecil, the “star attraction” in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, out of the game reserve in which he was living to shoot him with a bow and arrow. The lion did not die immediately, so they had to track him for 40 hours before finishing him off.

Unfortunately for them, Cecil also had a GPS collar, which they were unable to remove. Two people are now under arrest — Theo Bronchorst, the guide who helped lure Cecil out of the park, and the ironically named Honest Trymore Ndlovu, the farmer on whose land they lured the big cat, with his permission — but the dentist is back in Eden Prairie Minnesota.

This whole thing was so upsetting that it actually got Jimmy Kimmel — who is not known to take many things so seriously — that he was visibly upset.

On Tuesday, the dentist’s practice was closed because there was so much outrage on social media. He is now in hiding. He has since “apologized” and claimed that he was relying on the expertise of his guides and assumed that all his permits were in order and that everything was legal.

Yeah. Right.

He couldn’t exactly have missed the fact that his guides were luring the lion out of the national park by baiting him with dead meat.

Palmer is free to be a big game hunter; the rest of us are free to close down his business and hound him into obscurity. I realize shaming on the Internet is a dangerous thing, but this guy deserves the shame.