JACKALS 461 



in Cape Colony and the Transvaal. It appears that for some years 

 past large sums of money have been expended in the destruction of 

 so-called jackals, without any discrimination being exercised in regard 

 to which are harmful and which beneficial. For the majority of these 

 animals are not carnivorous in a fashion which will harm the sheep- 

 farmer, but prey on certain rodents and vermin which are highly 

 injurious to the agricultural interest. According to the writer, in some 

 of the north-western districts of Cape Colony the destruction of these 

 small carnivora resulted some years ago in a plague of rats and mice, 

 which did at least as much harm as was ever inflicted by sheep-killing 

 jackals, and began to spoil the veld to an alarming extent by devouring 

 the roots of bushes. Fortunately, a drought, which did much harm to 

 flocks, did not spare the mice, and the " balance of power " was restored, 

 so that farmers could start with a clean slate, if they would write off as 

 a dead loss the money wasted in paying for the destruction of beneficial 

 animals. The really mischievous species is the black-backed, or, as it 

 is generally called at the Cape, the silver or red jackal. One farmer in 

 the Graaf-Reinet district found, for instance, that after putting up a 

 vermin-proof fence round his farm he raised 30 per cent more lambs ; 

 this jackal and the wild cat being the animals that had previously done 

 most of the mischief. In the Colony as a whole the annual loss, direct 

 and indirect, attributed to the black-backed jackal is set down at a 

 million and a half. On the other hand, the aard-wolf (Pr^/^/^j cristatus), 

 commonly known as the maanhaar (maned) jackal, is undoubtedly 

 a beneficial animal, generally feeding on white ants. In the midland 

 districts of the Colony, where ant-hills are scarce, it is, however, credited 

 with carnivorous habits, although, from its feeble dentition, it can 

 scarcely do much harm to stock. The bakoor (basin-eared) jackal, or 

 long-eared fox {Otocyon megalotis), is likewise stated to subsist almost 

 exclusively on ants, while the draai, or t'gamma jackal, the cama fox 

 {Cams cama) of naturalists, is asserted to live on mice, hares, and the 

 young of the smaller game. The name draai (Dutch for "turn ") is given 

 to this pretty little species from the swiftness with which it " doubles." 

 When moving, it is stated to carry the tail at right angles to its body in 

 a horizontal plane, a fact which does not appear to be recorded in any 

 work on natural history. 



It may be incidentally mentioned that the long-eared fox, the sole 

 living member of the genus Otocyon, is represented by an extinct species, 

 O. curvipalatus, in the upper Tertiary deposits of north-western India. 



