Part 30

Little elephants only a yard high used to inhabit Malta, and there still lives, according to Hagenbeck, the experienced zoologist of Hamburg, a dwarf species of elephant in yet unexplored districts of West Africa.

Experienced German hunters make a special plea for the use of rifles of heavier calibre. Many English hunters are of the same opinion.

The raison d’être of these powerful weapons of the African elephant is a difficult question. Why did the extinct mammoth carry such very different tusks, curving upwards? Why has the Indian elephant such small tusks, and the Ceylon elephant hardly any at all, whilst the African’s are so huge and heavy?

On that occasion I had not at hand a telephoto-lens of sufficient range.

The well-known naturalist, Hagenbeck, remembers the immense numbers of giraffes which were bagged in the Sudan some thirty years ago.

Later observers questioned this fact. When I have used the word “mimicry,” I have done so not in the original sense of Bates and Wallace, but as denoting the conformity of the appearance of animals with their environment.

Some years earlier one of our best zoologists, after a long stay in the Masai uplands, had described the giraffes as “rare and almost extinct”: a striking proof of the great difficulty there is in coming upon these animals.

The author has often heard it asserted that the giraffe does much harm to the African vegetation and therefore should be exterminated. Such assertions should be speedily and publicly denied. They are on a level with the demand for the complete extermination of African game with a view to getting rid of the tsetse-fly.

Giraffa reticulata de Winton and Giraffa schillingsi, Mtsch.

Cf. With Flashlight and Rifle.

Recent reports from West Africa confirm what I say about the disastrous results of allowing the natives to hunt with firearms. The same regrettable state of things prevails in every part of the world in which this is permitted.

I do not know of any “telephoto” picture of animals in rapid motion having been published anywhere previously to my own. Those I refer to here are of animals at rest or moving quite slowly.

Flashlight photographs may be taken by daylight, as is proved by this photograph and some of those of rhinoceroses in With Flashlight and Rifle.

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.]