Of course you can buy Cecil the lion merchandise

RIP, Cecil the lion. You may be gone, but your legacy lives on through the medium of tacky merchandise. It's the circle of life.

While more than £550,000 in donations has poured in to the Oxford University Wildlife Conservation Research Unit since the protected lion was shot with a crossbow and then decapitated and skinned by dentist Walter Palmer, aka, The Most Hated Man in the World, other tributes have been less tasteful.

Toy-maker Ty Inc. has created a Cecil Beanie Baby, profits from which are going towards conservation efforts - and he is pretty cute, what with the black mane and everything:

But that's just the beginning. Phonecase maker GoldGenie has rolled out a 24 karat gold Cecil-embossed HTC phone case, which can be yours for just £1,580 (10 per cent from each sale is going to Zimbabwean conservation charity Friends of Hwange).

And of course there are the bootleggers: Redbubble is offering a plethora of T-shirts reading 'Je Suis Cecil' and 'Justice for Cecil', there's a pub in Norwich that's named a new beer 'Cecil's Revenge' and a bakery in Leeds has combined revenge-fantasy with cake:

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