THE PIG AND HIPPOPOTAMUS 289 
Pheto by G. W. Wilson & Co, Ltd, 
HIPPOPOTAMUS 
The skin of the hippopotamus is often as much as an inch and a half in thickness on the upper parts of the body 
killed, as all round the pool festoons of meat were hanging on poles to dry, and a large 
number of natives had been living for some time on nothing but hippopotamus-meat. 
Altogether I imagine that a herd of at least twenty animals must have been destroyed. 
Much as one must regret such a wholesale slaughter, it must be remembered that this great 
killing was the work of hungry savages, who at any rate utilised every scrap of the meat 
thus obtained, and much of the skin as well, for food; and such an incident is far less 
reprehensible — indeed, stands on quite a different plane as regards moral guilt — to the wanton 
destruction of a large number of hippopotamuses in the Umzingwani River, near Bulawayo, 
within a few months of the conquest of Matabililand by the Chartered Company’s forces in 
1893 These animals had been protected for many years by Lo Bengula and his father 
Umziligazi before him; but no sooner were the Matabili conquered and their country thrown 
open to white men than certain unscrupulous persons destroyed all but a very few of these 
half-tame animals, for the sake of the few paltry pieces of money their hides were worth! 
Gradually, as the world grows older, more civilised, and, to my thinking, less and less 
interesting, the range of the hippopotamus, like that of all other large animals, must become 
more and more circumscribed; but now that all Africa has been parcelled out amongst the 
white races of Western Europe, if the indiscriminate killing of hippopotamuses by either white 
men or natives can be controlled, and the constant and cruel custom of firing at the heads of 
these animals from the decks of river-steamers all over Africa be put a stop to, I believe that 
this most interesting mammal, owing to the nature of its habitat, and the vast extent of the 
rivers, swamps, and lakes in which it still exists in considerable numbers, will long outlive 
all other pachydermatous animals. Hideous, uncouth, and unnecessary as the hippopotamus 
