When Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer shot and killed beloved Zimbabwean lion Cecil with a bow and arrow in July 2015, the world responded with grief, outrage and revulsion. Signs appeared on the door of his practice: “We are Cecil”;
“#Catlives matter” and “Rot in hell”. Palmer’s business, for the time being, was toast; his reputation was destroyed globally.
The loss was personal, too, for a small group of scientists at Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, who had been tracking Cecil for seven years through his GPS-satellite collar. But for this team, a more positive scenario was unfolding. In the hours and days after Cecil’s death became public, thousands of people called the unit offering whatever help they could to save other big cats from a similar fate.
For Oxford anthropologist Professor Harvey Whitehouse, the phenomenon his colleagues were experiencing triggered a bigger idea that fed into his years of research in the field of social cohesion – the collective rituals that bind us, particularly those of group identification and identity fusion. He launched a longitudinal study surveying a group of the callers, and discovered that over time, they began to regard Cecil’s death as a life-changing episode – a transformative moment in their views on wildlife conservation. It was, he says, a
