It turns out that it was not a Spanish hunter who killed Cecil the Lion, the star attraction of Zimbabwe's wildlife tourism at Hwange national park.  It was an American dentist from Minneapolis, Minnesota - one with a sordid history of paying big bucks to kill animals, sometimes legally.

The hunt took place on 6 July.  Walter Palmer left the lion skinned and headless on the outskirts of the park, after paying around US$55,000 to leave a freshly killed prey animal right outside the boundaries of Hwange, where Cecil was protected by law from people like Palmer.  Cecil came out for the free meal, and Palmer tried and failed to kill Cecil with a bowhunting rig.  Cecil, wounded, took off running.

"They tracked him down and found him 40 hours later when they shot him with a gun," said Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force spokesman Johnny Rodrigues.  They later located the weakened Cecil, killed him with a gun, and decapitated him on the scene.

"As far as I understand, Walter believes that he might have shot that lion that has been referred to as Cecil," a spokesman told the UK Guardian Newspaper.  "What he'll tell you is that he had the proper legal permits and he had hired several professional guides, so he's not denying that he may be the person who shot this lion.  He is a big-game hunter; he hunts the world over."

This is not the first time that Palmer has dropped big bikkies on trophy hunts.  A 2009 New York Times profile says the father-of-two routinely drops tens of thousands of dollars to shoot wild animals - sometimes legally, sometimes not.

The fallout will hurt Zimbabwe.  People came from all over the world to see and photograph Cecil in Hwange national park, bringing in millions of tourism dollars with them.  Compare that to the US$55,000 that Palmer spent to lure the animal to its death.  But Lions live in structured societies, and the pride will experience repercussions.  "The saddest part of all is that now that Cecil is dead, the next lion in the hierarchy, Jericho, will most likely kill all Cecil’s cubs so that he can insert his own bloodline into the females," said Rodrigues.