Last night, and all day, I have been getting messages via e-mail about Walter Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who admitted to killing Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe. He has apologized and sent a letter to his patients, and to the public he said he believed the hunt was legal, and he deeply regretted participating in it. Many people do not believe he is sincere.

On Facebook, I was tagged in a score or  more petitions denouncing Dr. Palmer, urging a ban on bow hunting in Africa, asking the federal government to ban the important of lion heads into America. Dr. Palmer was forced by an outpouring of threats and outrage on Facebook to take down his social media pages, he has closed his office for the past few days. Local police say he has received too many death threats to count. Many thousands of people, all of them safe behind their keyboards,  have vowed to kill him, burn his offices, track down and threaten his patients, force him to leave his home.

For now, at least, Palmer’s life appears to have been ruined, but the digital mob swirling around the story wants much more blood than that.

I should be clear that people are, of course, free to express their outrage in any legal way they wish. I am not telling other people what to do, I am only writing about what I feel comfortable doing. I suspect it is not what many wish to hear. In our time, harming animals is an outrage, harming people in their name is a virtue. To me, both are an outrage.

Outrage is a very personal thing, and the story of Cecil is a horrible one. I cannot imagine anyone paying $55,000 for the privilege of killing a lion in such a cruel way and bringing home it’s head. Cecil was  hit by a bow and arrow shot by Palmer and suffered for 40 hours before another killer shot him, skinned him, and cut his head off.

From the brief things I have read about Dr. Palmer, he has a controversial past, and he did a stupid and vicious thing. It is not for me to judge his character on Facebook. There are many volunteers for that, hundreds, if not thousands, of sites. It’s one of those stories that makes me sad to be a man.

I can’t imagine a woman doing what Palmer did. Animals pay every day for our ignorance and cruelty. I am sorry to see the tragic death of an animal used to rationalize and support so much hatred of a human being, this has become increasingly common.

The doctor has responded appropriately, I have no way of judging his truthfulness or sincerity. He has apologized, explained how it happened, promised not to do it again. He has no real excuse, but then, I am not God.  In Zimbabwe, hunting is legal, I do not know what was in his head.  I do not care to join the enraged and righteous throngs sitting at their computers and smartphones trashing him any further and seeking to threaten him and destroy his life. I do not grasp how this will help a single animal.

I hate very few things in this world, but mobs are one of them. I will never stand alongside any mob, no mob has ever served the interests of justice or humanity, mobs are the refuge of the coward, an awful side creation of the Internet that does vastly more harm than good. Mobs have no conscience or reason, they are like tornadoes, they simply destroy what is in front of them.

Dr. Palmer deserves a lot of condemnation, and if he broke the law, he deserves more than that. I hope the government does move to ban animal trophies imported by vain and macho American hunters, this incident seems a disgraceful violation of the ethical code of the hunters that I know. That was the one petition I was happy to sign. I think it is clear that what the doctor did was outrageous, he does not need any more enraged messages from me, and I was sorry to think that so many people assumed I would be eager grab a torch and march on his Facebook Page.

Twitter bravery is not real bravery, mobs are not about justice. Tweets are not acts of courage or mercy. Mobs, by definition, are incapable of rational or individual judgement or thought. They are mobs, collectives, inevitably beyond control. They de-humanize their targets, they turn people who do bad things into monsters, and once de-humanized, they exist outside of the moral community and any angry or cruel behavior towards them is justified. There is no due process or system of fairness in any mob.

But for me, a mob is worse than most, if not all of the crimes it seeks to punish.  Condemnations are never enough for mobs, there is never enough blood to satisfy them. Digital outrage is cheap and anonymous, it means little and does little good. Dr. Palmer’s trip reminds me that we need a wiser and more mystical understanding of animals than this, animals do not exist for this purpose, this is one of the valid goals of the increasingly extremist animal rights movement, to protect animals from this kind of deprivation. Cecil had the right to be spared this awful fate.

As to Dr. Palmer, I draw the line here. Everyone has to do what seems right for them. Palmer seems genuinely sorry, stunned by what happened. He has apologized and says he has learned from his dreadful mistake. He has the right to live his life. If he has broken the law, he has to deal with the law. That’s enough for me.

Mobs murder persons in their own way, they kill personhood, as fragile a thing as the body sometimes. The history of mobs is as horrendous as the story of Cecil, it is  one of the most awful legacies of the human experience. I am proud to have never joined one, and I will not join this one.

A moral law I have always followed: The mob is never the right place for me to be.