3/6 GAME AND GAME PRESERVATION IN ZULULAND. 



opposition because of their doubts as to what may be the 

 economic resuks of preservation. 



The other is very differently constituted, people whose 

 motives are almost entirely personal and selfish, and those who 

 speak and act through ignorance, an ignorance which frequently 

 displays itself in loud self-assertiveness. 



The former class have hitherto evinced a praiseworthy 

 desire to arrive at a mutually satisfactory understanding with the 

 powers that be on the basis of the preservation of game in stich 

 manner that it shall not constitute a menace to their domestic 

 animals. 



During the last fifteen years mtich useful work has been 

 accomplished by the champions of protection, particularly in the 

 Transvaal, and some check has been placed upon the wholesale 

 and cruel slaughter of wild game. 



Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that, as regards Natal 

 at any rate, we stand, as it were, at a parting of the ways, and 

 that the cause of protection never stood in more urgent need 

 of thoughtful, unprejudiced, but withal strenuous support than 

 at the present moment. 



Few people, it ma}' be asserted, realise how sure, though 

 gradual, has been the disap])earance of the wild fauna of the 

 sub-continent during the past fifty years. Even those whose 

 experience only carries them back a dozen years, and whose 

 knowledge is concerned with but a limited portion of the 

 country, cannot be blind to the existence of this process of ex- 

 termination, while those who have wandered afar during the 

 past twenty-five years, and who remember the amazing wealth 

 of animal life of which the country boasted even in those days, 

 stand aghast at the dismal tragedy which is daily being enacted. 



The former can no more grasp the reality of the ])rofusion 

 of wild game as it existed twenty-five years ago than the latter, 

 in their earlier days, could realise that its extermination would 

 ever be as nearly complete, relatively, as it is now. 



The humane man, and more particularly the true lover of 

 nature, can but feel infinite regret for the purposeless waste of 

 life which has been gc)ing on ceaselessly during the last two 

 generations, and which has de])rived the Continent as a whole, 

 and the southern portion in particular, of one of its grandest 

 assets, ^nd of one of its most valuable educational media. 



And if it is persisted in the writer can already see, in 

 imaginati( n. a countr\- wliicli once boasted the possession of an 

 ap])arently inexhaustible wealth of faunal life become a void 

 and lifeless waste. 



There is no tuiprejtidiced person but will admit that while 

 this country ]X)ssesses scenic beauties in its mountain regions, 

 and in many of its tropical i)arts, the vastly greater portion of 

 its land surface is dull and uninteresting, and that where it is 

 otherwise, it is almost solely due to the i>resence of animal and 

 bird life. Under that sj^ell the most desert regions become 

 charmed and quickened into beauty, and keen interest and 



