324 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



sailors, necessity knows no law, and I don't think any the 

 worse of them because they are occasionally driven to canni- 

 balism. 



There has been much discussion as to the manner in which 

 lions kill their prey. In ' Wild Beasts and their Ways,' the 

 last of the many interesting works on travel, sport and natural 

 history for which Englishmen are indebted to Sir Samuel Baker, 

 that great authority says that the lion uses his paw in attack 

 with which to deal a crushing blow in contradistinction to the 

 tiger, which only makes use of its claws to hold its prey. Now 

 it is always possible that in a vast continent like Africa animals 

 of one species may develop different habits in widely separated 

 portions of the country ; but, however that may be, all my ex- 

 perience goes to show that, in Southern Africa, lions kill their 

 prey very much in the same way as Sir Samuel Baker tells us 

 tigers do in India ; that is, they use their claws to hold their 

 victim, and do the killing with their teeth. A single large male 

 lion will sometimes kill a heavy ox or a buffalo cow, without 

 using his teeth at all, by breaking its neck, or rather causing the 

 frightened beast to break its own neck. Almost invariably 

 when an ox or a buffalo has been killed by a single lion, deep 

 claw marks will be found on the muzzle of the animal, and when 

 that is the case, it will usually be found that the neck has been 

 dislocated. Such animals have been killed in the following 

 manner. We will suppose that a large heavy ox weighing 

 i,ooolbs. is seized by a lion, whilst grazing or walking, the 

 attack being made from the left side. In that case the lion 

 seizes the ox by the muzzle with its left paw, pulling its head in 

 under it. At the same time with the extended claws of the 

 right paw it holds its victim by the top of the shoulder, its 

 hind feet being firmly planted on the ground. The ox plunges 

 madly forward, and from the position in which its head is held 

 not seeing where it is going, and hampered by the weight of 

 the lion, soon falls, and rolling over, as often as not breaks its 

 neck by the weight of its own body. 



When several lions attack an ox in concert, they do not 



