296 
ON SAFARI 
places. With these efforts and those tears I have scant 
sympathy. What is wanted is something more practical 
than tears—the energy to wake up while yet there is 
time, to assure the safety and well-being of those 
faunas that still survive, and to render any repetition 
of such barbarities impossible, at least on British soil. 
Practical measures, plus the power to enforce them, 
are the one essential; and these must be taken in 
advance. Doctors avail not when the patient is dead. 
In British East Africa, along with our highland 
domain, we have succeeded to a faunal inheritance that 
is second to none now surviving on earth. 1 That splendid 
asset it is nothing less than our duty to hand down 
unimpaired and unencumbered to future generations— 
subject always, it goes without saying, to the necessities 
of white settlement and colonisation. 
At the moment no very serious danger threatens. 
The Game-ordinances of the Protectorate are essentially 
practical, and the one weak point—a shortage in the 
power to enforce them—is being remedied. These 
ordinances, it is pertinent to point out, were drawn in 
the first instance (and amended as circumstances dic¬ 
tated) by men who, better than any other, understood the 
necessities of the Colony ; first, of course, in relation to 
its white population, while yet in sympathy with the 
aborigines—whether wild beasts or savage men. 
The chief danger to big game in all lands and at all 
times has been the use of the horse. Riding-down game 
and then shooting at random into flying herds is the 
worst of all barbarisms—to say nothing of its being the 
most wasteful. My own experience demonstrates that 
for each head of game killed by this method, an average 
of five or six others escaped wounded, to die uselessly on 
the veld. 
That combination of horse-and-rifle together I utterly 
condemn. It is unsportsmanlike, since nop one man in 
a hundred can be trusted (or can trust himself) to act 
1 It is equalled, nevertheless, in British Central Africa—in 
Barotseland, Nyassaland and Northern .Rhodesia. 
