Dentist who killed Cecil the lion set to return to work

Minneapolis • The Minnesota dentist who killed Cecil the lion and sparked a global backlash emerged for an interview in which he disputed some accounts of the hunt, expressed agitation at the animosity directed at those close to him and said he would be back at work within days.

Walter Palmer, who has spent more than a month out of sight after becoming the target of protests and threats, intends to return to his suburban Minneapolis dental practice Tuesday. In an interview Sunday evening conducted jointly by The Associated Press and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Palmer said again that he believes he acted legally and that he was stunned to find out his hunting party had killed one of Zimbabwe's treasured animals.

"If I had known this lion had a name and was important to the country or a study, obviously I wouldn't have taken it," Palmer said. "Nobody in our hunting party knew before or after the name of this lion."

Cecil was a fixture in the vast Hwange National Park and had been fitted with a GPS collar as part of Oxford University lion research. Palmer said he shot the big cat with the black mane using an arrow from his compound bow outside the park's borders, but it didn't die immediately. He disputed conservationist accounts that the wounded lion wandered for 40 hours and was finished off with a gun, saying it was tracked down the next day and killed with an arrow.

Palmer shut off several lines of inquiry about the hunt, including how much he paid for it or others he has undertaken. No videotaping or photographing of the interview was allowed. During the 25-minute interview, Palmer gazed intensely at his questioners, often fiddling with his hands and turning occasionally to an adviser, Joe Friedberg, to field questions about the fallout and his legal situation.

Some high-level Zimbabwean officials have called for Palmer's extradition, but no formal steps toward getting the dentist to return to Zimbabwe have been publicly disclosed.

After Palmer was named in late July as the hunter who killed Cecil, his Bloomington clinic and Eden Prairie home became protest sites, and a vacation property he owns in Florida was vandalized. Palmer has been vilified across social media, with some posts suggesting violence against him. He described himself as "heartbroken" for causing disruptions for staff at his clinic, which was shuttered for weeks until reopening in late August without him on the premises. And he said the ordeal has been especially hard on his wife and adult daughter, who both felt threatened.

"I don't understand that level of humanity to come after people not involved at all," Palmer said.

He declined to say where he's spent the last six weeks or describe security steps he has taken.

"I've been out of the public eye. That doesn't mean I'm in hiding," Palmer said.

Cecil's killing set off a fierce debate over trophy hunting in Africa. Zimbabwe tightened regulations for lion, elephant and leopard hunting after the incident, and three major U.S. airlines changed policies to ban shipment of the trophies.