

8 ANIMAL LIFE IN AFRICA 



the water that it is difficult to understand how they did 

 not detect the presence of a foe. Certain it is that no 

 human being could thus have evaded notice. 



There can be no doubt that, under natural conditions, 

 the existence of a certain number of predatory animals is 

 beneficial to the condition of the game within any given 

 area, strange though it may sound to say so. The aged and 

 the less fit are killed off, and the herbivora, which, if 

 allowed to increase unmolested, would quickly eat up all 

 the vegetation of a country, are kept within due limits. 

 Obviously, where man, armed with modern weapons, 

 desires to take his share, the candle cannot thus be burned 

 at both ends without permanent harm resulting, and it 

 then becomes necessary to keep down artificially the 

 predatory beasts by every means possible. 



Most flesh-eating animals change their ordinary diet 

 only under pressure of hunger. Normally, they prey 

 upon some species which is at once abundant and can be 

 overcome with the smallest expenditure of energy. It 

 is when such food fails, or becomes scarce, that they are 

 forced to take what they can find. 



" It is true that there are perverted individuals among \ 

 animals, just as there are objectionable characters among j 

 men, and these, by their overt acts, tend to discredit their / 

 class as a whole. Yet both are comparatively rare./ 

 Nature carefully safeguards the permanency and welfare 

 of a species by making the healthy and virile individuals 

 wary, agile, and elusive, so that their natural enemies 

 are forced in the main to content themselves with the less 

 favoured individuals,. The wolf that pulls down the sick< 

 or enfeebled deer, or the hawk that devours the crippled 

 quail, is really benefiting the species it preys upon, though 

 at the expense of the individual, since by the removal 

 of the weak and unfit, more vigorous stock is secured and 



