THE WHITE-EARED COB 
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black beauty stood surrounded by a dozen pale-hued 
pals. These being females, their tawny pelage so closely 
assimilated with the yellow grass around as to mock the 
naked eye. Where the one sex was almost invisible, the 
other, in either case, was “given away ”! 
A decade ago, the idea universally held among big- 
game hunters—and shared by zoological authorities—was 
that the career of the white-eared cob followed these 
lines :—That all alike commenced life in a common pelage 
of tawny-fawn, but that (while females retained that 
colour unchanged) the males with age gradually assumed 
a darker coat; while the degree of darkness deepened 
proportionately as you travelled south. Consequently it 
was assumed that the farther south (within their range) 
the hunter penetrated, the handsomer and more typical 
would his trophies become. There exists a certain 
substratum of truth in the idea—it may be said to be 
based on a half - truth ; but half - truths are no good 
nowadays. 1 The misfortune of the current belief was that 
sportsmen refrained from shooting specimens of white¬ 
eared cob at the northernmost limits of their range, since 
1 While writing this chapter I was rather surprised to observe by an 
article in The Field (June 7th, 1919), that some systematists still cling to 
the exploded belief that the dark pelage is a necessary index of age. 
