AFRICAN GAME 
West Africa, and parts of German East Africa, the game has been very 
much reduced in numbers, both by hunting and by epidemic disease; 
whilst in some of the British Protectorates so much game has been shot 
of late years under sportsmen’s and settlers’ licences, that it is thought in 
many quarters that big game all over Africa must now be on the very 
verge of extinction. 
Happily, this is very far from being the case, and to-day there are still 
enormous areas of country in that vast continent in which lovers of nature 
and big game hunters will still be able to find, in their native haunts, 
every species of wild animal which was ever indigenous to Africa, with 
the sole exceptions of the blaauwbok and the true quagga, which latter was 
after all only a local race or sub-species of Burchell’s zebra.* 
Referring to the abundance of big game still to be found in British East 
Africa, Mr Roosevelt, in his recently published book, “ African Game 
Trails,” tells us that in this region “ nature, both as regards wild man 
and wild beast, does not differ materially from what it was in Europe in 
the late Pleistocene”; and this comparison, Mr Roosevelt maintains, is in 
no way fanciful, since “ the teeming multitudes of wild creatures, the 
stupendous size of some of them, the terrible nature of others, and the low 
culture of many of the savage tribes, especially of the hunting tribes, 
substantially reproduce the conditions of life in Europe as it was led by 
our ancestors ages before the dawn of anything that could be called 
civilization.” 
That this is a true picture of one large area of Africa to-day no one will 
deny who has recently travelled through that marvellously well -stocked 
game country, and in many other regions wild animals are almost equally 
plentiful. 
Fair fields, therefore, still exist in Africa to-day for the big game hunter, 
who has, moreover, in many ways immense advantages over his pre- 
decessor of an earlier generation. Instead of having to march to his 
hunting-grounds, often through hundreds of miles of unhealthy or water- 
less tracts of country, he is carried rapidly and comfortably by rail or 
steamer to the very heart of the continent. Nor need he apprehend any 
trouble from hostile or unfriendly natives, as these have now all been 
brought under the control of the various European administrations. The 
modern hunter, too, is armed with double-barrelled or magazine rifles 
*The Blaauwbok ( Hippotragus leuckopkceus), a near relative of the Roan antelope, became extinct towards the 
end of the eighteenth century; and the Quagga ( Equus quagga ) about 1875. 
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