6 ANIMAL LIFE IN AFRICA 



and fly cannot exist separately has led to a very strong 

 agitation to have the game exterminated in regions where 

 fly exists and where therefore these diseases are pre- 

 valent. The agitation at first sight seems to be very 

 reasonable, and its leaders are for the most part animated 

 by perfectly just motives. Behind them, however, is a 

 mass of support much less commendable in principle. 

 The fact is that in a large proportion of the human race 

 the " hunters' instinct," the desire to kill, to shed blood, 

 that heritage from savage ancestors, is but dormant. 

 To men living as it were on the spot, there is the further 

 inducement of the profit which might be made from the 

 sale of the hides, horns, and meat of the dead animals, 

 so long as the game lasted. When there is added to these 

 inducements to kill everything, a mere surface acquaint- 

 ance with the facts, an entire want of knowledge of 

 natural history, a callous lack of interest in or sympathy 

 with all lower animals, especially wild ones, except in so 

 far as they may be made of profit to man the tyrant, 

 and a secret objection to all laws and restrictions, just 

 because they are laws and restrictions, it may easily be 

 seen that any anti-game crusade is not likely to lack 

 support. 



Fortunately however for the wild animals, the in- 

 vestigations of the experts, while making clear the 

 responsibility of, at any rate some of them, for supplying 

 the tsetse fly with the disease germs, have brought out a 

 number of other facts, which shows the problem to be 

 very much more complicated than it would appear to 

 be at first sight. 



As regards sleeping sickness, it has been found that 

 domestic animals, no less than wild ones, are capable of 

 carrying the germs in their blood without harm to them- 

 selves, and may therefore be an even greater menace to 



