The White-Tailed Gnu 213 



gnu is every now and again poached. South African pastoral farms are 

 very large — often more than 10,000 acres in extent — and it is a difficult 

 and costly matter to patrol so large an extent of country. Only a year or 

 two back, some men with rifles — I cannot call them sportsmen — shot, 

 without leave, several black wildebeest on one of these protected farms in 

 the Orange Free State. I am glad to be able to mention that these 

 depredators were identified and heavily fined — if I remember rightly, to 

 the value of £10 a head for every animal slaughtered. But the infliction 

 of fines, however heavy, is quite useless towards the restoration of a rare 

 and vanishing species such as this. The white-tailed gnu in its wild state 

 and upon its own plains, where for tens of thousands of years it has disported 

 itself in the perfection of unrestricted freedom, is, I fear, doomed, like the 

 now extinct quagga, to disappear, destroyed, practically within a short 

 century, by the wanton, wasteful, and utterly short-sighted methods of the 

 Cape Dutch farmers. In the old days in Cape Colony the frontier farmers 

 shot black wildebeest and quagga principally for the purpose of supplying 

 their Hottentot herdsmen and servants with a food supply, and thus saving 

 their sheep and goats. They themselves and their families existed on a 

 better and more dainty kind of venison, the flesh of springbok, hartebeest, 

 gemsbok, or other antelopes. They also shot these animals for their skins, 

 which they required for ropes, halters, sacks, riems, harness, whips, and 

 other gear. Under this free-and-easy system the game of Cape Colony 

 soon began to vanish. But it remained for the wasteful farmers of the 

 Transvaal and Orange Free State to become mere sordid skin-hunters, and 

 to destroy millions of animals for the paltry value of their hides. These 

 hides were sent down country and shipped to Europe. In forty years even 

 the once apparently inexhaustible herds of the Free State and Transvaal 

 became shot out, and these countries are now all but devoid of the noble 

 game that once gave life and beauty and a perfectly unique charm to many 

 an otherwise dreary landscape. H. A. Brvden. 



