viii ELEPHANT-HUNTING IN EAST AFRICA 



advantage of artistic talent, enabling him to illustrate his 

 own works ? 



Of course, I am prepared to be denounced as cruel. 

 I admit at once that I am. This trait is part and parcel 

 of the barbaric tastes which caused me, in my earliest 

 years, to be stigmatised as a "cruel boy," by tender- 

 hearted members of the family, for my ardour in the 

 pursuit of the harmless, necessary cat, in company with 

 a couple of equally keen terriers, among the farmyards 

 of the neighbourhood (though I am bound to say that 

 the cats always escaped into trees or on the heights 

 of inaccessible ricks). One cannot complain of the 

 censure of kind-hearted people who object altogether 

 to the taking of life — on the contrary, I respect them. 

 But the attacks of such superior sportsmen as, while 

 themselves giving us graphic accounts of their exploits 

 in pursuit of the harmless eland, giraffe, and other 

 defenceless creatures, write in horror of the cruelty of 

 hunting elephants (having themselves not penetrated 

 far enough into the wilderness to get the chance) are 

 harder to bear. It is particularly cruel, they tell us, to 

 hunt cow elephants (especially to the hunter, no doubt). 

 I wish one of these gentlemen would come and show 

 us how to shoot bulls only, in the dense cover in which 

 elephants have to be sought in Equatorial Africa. 



By all means let elephants and other wild animals 

 be preserved as far as possible. But as, unfortunately, 

 their continued existence is incompatible with the advance 

 of civilisation, the only way to do so successfully is by 

 making reserves in places where effective control can be 

 exercised alike over natives and Europeans. 



