I woke up, checked Facebook, and there it was, trending as number one on the site.

I was still groggy and definitely only half awake, so as soon as I saw the name “Cecil,” I thought the worst — another hashtag to follow the stream of hashtags that seemed to have exploded into mainstream news in August 2014 beginning with the fatal shooting of Mike Brown.

Then, I read further. The lion.

What?

In Zimbabwe, a lion at a national park was wounded and then killed by a dentist and “big-game hunter,” Walter Palmer. International outcry sparked immediately, and various politicians, celebrities and animal conservationists quickly denounced Palmer’s actions.

For the next week or so, my eyes were constantly on the roll as I saw endless, plaintive Facebook statuses, change.org petitions, trenchant twitter take-downs and even the hashtag “#alllionsmatter” — what?

Almost at the same time, less than two weeks after Palmer shot Cecil the Lion, Sandra Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic violation by a Texas state trooper, taken into custody and then found dead in her jail cell on July 13.

Activists around the country were devastated, and demands quickly followed for law enforcement to follow up on the suspicious nature of Bland’s death. Bland’s name joined a long list of black individuals killed by police in 2015 and contributed to making July the deadliest month of the year for police killings — 118 people died in incidents with law enforcement, and more than 20, which is around one in six, were unarmed, according to The Guardian. In perspective, Business Insider reported that in 2011, 404 people were recorded to have died at the hands of the police, as compared to six people in Australia, two people in England and Wales and six in Germany.

New York Times op-ed writer Roxane Gay snarked on Twitter, “I’m personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care.”

Some on the Internet immediately hit back. One tweet by comedian Aamer Rahman sarcastically said, “Let’s not forget that lion on lion crime kills more lions every year than rogue dentists,” attaching a picture of two lions fighting with each other, a parody of the responses of those who try to derail conversations about racially motivated violence.

Yet the outrage over Sandra Bland’s death seemed paltry, even pitiful, compared to the reaction to Cecil the Lion’s death.

Just as a reality check, animals do die all the time, and horrifically so. Why did the outrage over that one lion outweigh the indignation over the polar bears struggling to survive as the ice caps melt, or the reef ecosystems collapsing all over the world due to bleaching? Humans are just as responsible for these instances as they are for the shooting of Cecil the Lion.

But even that’s beside the point when humans find themselves unable to exhibit that level of decency for each other. If someone starts bringing up the black lives taken by police, it only takes a moment for someone else to chime in, “But, all lives matter!” or “Maybe they could have been more courteous towards that police officer.”

This is not to say that I don’t believe animals deserve rights at all, or that no problems exist with the treatment of animals in this world. I think poaching is evil, I think that animal experimentation is inhumane, and I think the meat industry in general contributes way too much to humanity’s collective carbon footprint.

But the reaction to the fatal shooting of Cecil the Lion is only one instance of a long history of people caring more about or prioritizing the lives of animals over other human beings. Perhaps our fury over animal treatment might result in more successful changes across the world if we show at least that much regard for other human beings first.

This piece was originally published in the pages of the Winged Post on August 31, 2015.