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. 
