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 holdits 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 
1,000 lbs. 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 
ee a 
fe a ll aes 
