I'm sorry Cecil

I'm a little perplexed. I would consider myself a nature lover. While I may be painfully awful at keeping houseplants alive, at least once a year, I head out to the game reserve in the hope of catching a glimpse of anything from an owl to an aardvark.

And yet all of this hype around the man who killed Zimbabwe's most famous lion has left me unmoved. I realise this is a somewhat controversial statement but I just couldn't help scrolling past the countless social media posts about the hunting of this furry creature without a moment's hesitation.

Don't get me wrong, I have less than a meagre amount of respect for a person who pays money to hunt a wild animal and calls it sport. And parades the lifeless body of the creature they have just shot around like a trophy.

But the whole thing got me to thinking: while the Internet, mobile devices and social media have become these formidable tools that facilitate learning, communication and promotion, is all of this "stuff" resulting in a kind of digital apathy? Whereby we have so many causes, petitions and ideas shoved in our faces every day that we tend to become a little blas'e about things.

Allow me to continue with the discussion about Cecil. He's the lion that all the fuss is about. The online response to the hunting of this animal has been nothing short of a tornado. The hunter in question is US dentist Dr Walter Palmer. A petition on the WhiteHouse.gov Web site calling for Palmer to be extradited has received about 200 000 signatures. A Facebook page titled: "Shame Lion Killer Dr Walter Palmer and River Bluff Dental" has been created, and enraged environmentalists have flooded the Yelp page for his Minnesota dental practice with negative reviews.

But the Internet vigilantism doesn't stop there; members of the public managed to track down his contact information and the details of his various social media accounts and spread this information, along with specifics about his family and business, on the Internet. They also flooded his Web site with so much traffic that it was taken offline.

And even the Zim government has gotten involved; also calling on the US to extradite Palmer, who environment minister Oppah Muchinguri claims has "put further strain on the relationship between Zimbabwe and the USA".

At the end of 2014, our collective disgust was directed at a different lion killer. Her name was Melissa Bachman. She became a global talking point after sharing a post-hunt snap of herself beside the male lion she had just killed. And the world was up in arms.

At the end of 2014, our collective disgust was directed at a different lion killer. Her name was Melissa Bachman.

Petitions were started and received countless signatures, a "Stop Melissa Bachman" Facebook page was launched, and a scathing Web-based lynch mob was born. But today, about a year-and-a-half later, a quick visit to Ms Bachman's Twitter page reveals she is still very much a hunter, she still poses for pictures with her fans (yes, she still has fans) and the wild beasts whose lives she has ended, and can still be seen on TV discussing her latest shotgun shooting or bow and arrow wielding escapades. Although I did notice a disclaimer on her Twitter profile: "All meat is used to feed my family or donated to people in need"; the meat from the lion featured in that infamous snap included. Apparently. And so all that fuss and we didn't manage to stop her at all.

In the decade from 1999 to 2009, 800 lions were killed in legal hunts in Zimbabwe, which doesn't factor in the number of animals that were killed illegally. So what was it about this particular incident that attracted so much attention?

According to National Geographic, Cecil had become somewhat of a celebrity and was quite comfortable around humans. He was described as "large and powerful, but regal". Keeping this in mind, it is obvious people are angry because a lion was killed, but are they a little extra angry because this particular lion just so happened to be the perfect specimen of the king of the jungle? Coupled with the fact that he was a pretty popular lion too?

Which, on a broader level, ties into how we as a society deem certain things more important than others. Cheeky Instagram snaps from the next big model or movie star and celebrity Twitter spats become viral sensations and yet, less aesthetically appealing issues fail to make even the slightest media ripple.

So Cecil is gone and it won't be long before the news media and social media move on to the next topic. Which begs the question: who will we be directing our mutual disdain at in months and years to come?

* A former ITWeb journalist, Joanne Carew now resides in the Mother City, where she is admiring the mountain and completing her Masters studies at UCT.