THE CONSERVATION OF AFRICAN PLAINS GAME 347 



coats. They are unable to alter their metabolism accordingly, especially in 

 respect to heat loss, so that in a warm climate they lose condition to a 

 remarkable extent, becoming also predisposed to any disease infection which 

 may be in the vicinity. 



The wild game are adapted to this environment also in their immunity 

 from many if not most of the cattle diseases, and especially to those associated 

 with trypanosomiasis. Domestic breeds of cattle are susceptible to these 

 diseases and, with sheep and goats, are regularly attacked by the Glossina 

 species found in the tsetse-infected bush which forms the migration paths of 

 the game. In recent surveys of the blood types present in Glossina spp. in 

 East Africa, no flies were found to have fed on the commonest forms of 

 plains game, wildebeest, zebra, hartebeest and topi, and very few on impala, 

 eland, waterbuck, duiker and buffalo; even where these were numerous 

 (Hindle, 1959). Domestic animals were always attacked. These various lines 

 of enquiry suggest that the wild game may have adaptive advantages in arid 

 and disease-infested country such as that we are talking about, and thus it 

 might well be ecologically justifiable to think of using them and of harvesting 

 them as the protein crop. This could make their preservation a justifiable 

 method of land-use. 



COMPARISON OF SIMILAR FORMS OF LAND USE 



If the arguments used earlier are correct, then the comparative basis of 

 rational biological forms of land use would be the amount of protein they 

 would yield from a given area. As an illustration I shall attempt to estimate 

 the yield given by wild game in the Western Serengeti with that given by 

 the Masai pastoral economy in and around the Crater Highlands, where it 

 excludes most of the game. The game use the western bush and the river 

 vaUey in the dry season, where there are no Masai. Both the game and the 

 Masai share the Serengeti plain in the wet season. The main game migration 

 routes as we have seen take in some 5,000 square km of country. The data 

 for the Masai refer to an area which must be generally similar in size, but it 

 includes some forest and some high mountain, and as I wish to avoid any 

 reduction of the apparent value of the human economy, it will be wiser to 

 regard the Masai as using definitely and intensively not more than 

 3,875 square km (1,500 square miles). Thus the attempt to estimate the 

 stocking intensity for Masai cattle, sheep and goats, which follows will give 

 rather overestimates than underestimates. In this area of about 1,500 square 

 miles there are about 9,000 Masai (Grant, 1954) and they own some 120,000 

 cattle, each about the size of a Jersey cow. There are also some 200,000 sheep 

 and goats of large breeds (Pearsall, 1957). By weight this will give about one 



