CHAPTER XIV 

 ANIMAL INDUSTRY 



INTRODUCTION 



IT has been pointed out in previous chapters that the plant and 

 animal industries cannot be treated separately. Accordingly, the 

 sections on mixed farming, education, and the fertilizer problem 

 in the last chapter must be borne in mind when considering animal 

 industry. The subjects dealt with in this chapter include the 

 characters of African stock, the possibility of improving the breeds, 

 the effects of overgrazing, the diseases from which the animals suf- 

 fer, and subsidiary topics such as hides and skins and the preserva- 

 tion of meat for market. A few general matters, however, must 

 first be mentioned before these questions are discussed. 



The opinion is sometimes expressed that the future prosperity 

 of all the drier parts of Africa lies in pastoral farming rather than 

 in agriculture. This extreme view has few supporters, since trade 

 statistics show that animal products constitute a small proportion 

 of the whole exports and in the internal economy crops play far 

 the greater part. Nevertheless, livestock is the mainstay of exis- 

 tence of many African tribes to-day, and is likely to remain so 

 for several generations to come. In the future, moreover, animals 

 and their products are likely to take a much more important place 

 in internal trade as a more commercial attitude is adopted by the 

 natives towards their stock. Thus there are clearly possibilities 

 for the development of an animal industry, perhaps in close con- 

 tact with cultivation in systems of mixed farming. Although the 

 extension of white settlement to the point where stocks of pedigree 

 European breeds have ousted native cattle from much of Southern 

 Africa and the tropical highlands is not impossible, such develop- 

 ment is very unlikely in the low-lying areas, or in the semi-arid 



