Cecil the lion: Piers Morgan wants to hunt down Walter Palmer and mount his head on a wall

"He’s just a smirking, vile, calluous assassin with no heart," says the columnist

Piers Morgan (Getty)

Piers Morgan has earned a reputation for inflaming corners of the internet with his opinions. But his latest column in The Daily Mail might be one of his most popular ones yet.

Morgan condemned dentist Walter Palmer, who made headlines this week after paying $50,000 to hunt and kill Cecil, a famous lion from Zimbabwe’s Hwange national park.

"Dr Palmer makes me puke. He’s just a smirking, vile, callous assassin with no heart," he said.

Morgan said he'd like to do to Palmer what he did to Cecil, describing it in graphic detail.

"I will sell tickets for $50,000 to anyone who wants to come with me and track down fat, greedy, selfish, murderous businessmen like Dr Palmer in their natural habit.

"We would all take a bow and fire a few arrows into his limbs to render him incapable of movement.

"Then we’d calmly walk over, skin him alive, cut his head from his neck, and took a bunch of photos of us all grinning inanely at his quivering flesh.

"Like Cecil, he’s an ageing, greying creature eeking out the last quarter of his life. He’s going to die soon enough anyway, right?"

After photos of Palmer posing with Cecil’s dead body surfaced online, it was revealed that Palmer and his fellow hunters lured Cecil out the park by dragging a dead animal behind their vehicle.

Once he strayed outside his home, they struck him with a bow and arrow, although it took another forty hours before Palmer and his group caught up with Cecil and shot him.

Palmer is reportedly wanted for questioning on suspicion of deliberately luring an animal from the park to kill it, and removing Cecil’s identifying collar, which should have protected him from being hunted.