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I assume this must be some obscure word play that I can't figure out. The overall clue of this NYT style crossword puzzle is "Animal Opposites".

The three clues relevant to this overarching clue and their answers are:

  1. A bird of prey without a mate? --> Lonesome Hawk
  2. Where you might buy an albino beast of burden? --> White Donkey Sale
  3. What a photographer of hunter in Alaska might do? --> Shoot the Bear

I got these based on the other letters and so on, but I can't for the life of me figure out how these answers fit into the overall clue. Sure, they're animals, but I don't get the "opposites" part.

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What the author has done is take a phrase involving animals and changed the animal to an opposite one.

So we have:

Lonesome Dove : Dove (pacifist) becomes a Hawk (predator). From Encyclopedia.com.

White Elephant Sale : Elephant (Republicans), Donkey (Democrats) [@Deusovi]

Shoot the Bull : Bulls and Bears from the Stock Market.

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    $\begingroup$ "Elephant" and "Donkey" are opposites because of US politics -- the elephant is the symbol of the Republicans, and the donkey is the symbol of the Democrats. (These are the two major opposing US political parties.) $\endgroup$
    – Deusovi ♦
    Commented Jun 20, 2019 at 6:24
  • $\begingroup$ Ah, so tricky. I was focusing my "opposite-finding" efforts on the adjectives... $\endgroup$
    – Lagerbaer
    Commented Jun 20, 2019 at 17:04

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