The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-07-19

On the contrary, when the white men shot an antelope they were eager to
 devour it raw, and fell on it like pack
 of hyenas. But 1t had never occurred
 to them that they might kill large
 animal with weapons, or even to dig
 pitfalls for them, The result was that
 the plains were swarming with great
 game which had absolutely no fear of
 man. and the balance of nature exist
 ed undisturbed. The caravan marched
 through herds of game so tame that the
 travellers could walk among the ami
 mals and look at them. Buffalo, hart
 beest, cobus antelope and many others
 were seen in all directions. There was
 some water and abundance of dry
 grass. But the plains were shadeless
 and arid in most places conditions
 which do not seem hostile to q great
 accumulation of animal life, whether in
 central Africa or in the far south of
 America.
 MT. Moore says nothing of lions on
 these great game plains; but we can
 scarcely conclude that the beasts live
 there unvexed by natural enemies of
 uIly hlllIl. bul IL CililllOL pe houblSd
 that this is an instance in which ami
 mals show that if protected or unmo-
 tested by man they are always capable of maintaining number probably only
 limited by the food production Of the ground they haunt. We seldom hear of wholesale loss of life from famine among wild ruminant animals, such as
 takes place on the sheep runs of Aus
 tralia when a drouth lasts for an unu- sual time. Man over populates the
 land with the animals he protects, as he denudes 1t of others. Nature keeps up just the stock which the ground will carry. But it is remarkable that this should hold good in places where the destroying carnivora are present equal
 ly with those in which they are not On the Athi plains, for instance, on the Uganda railway, lions swarm; yet the game when the line was first made seemed as numerous as on the Albert Nyanza flats. This is the more extra ordinary because zebras, large ante lopes, giraffes and wildebeest only pro duce one, or at most a pair of young in a year, while lioness may and often does, have four bulbs in litter. By ordinary rules the lions ought in time to exceed the number of their prey. There are no animal infant insurance companies to put premium on cub mortality among lions, and no other creatures, except possibly the spotted hunting dogs, dare touch the cubs of the lioness, while hunting dogs, hyenas, leopards, servals and jackals are all on the watch for the calves of antelopes and zebra foals. Yet as the lions, even in these most lion haunted plains, do not increase fast enough to kill off the other game, we must suppose that there is great mortality among the wild cubs. In confinement the death rate is extraordinarily high. Probably, also. the lioness is a bad mother and nurse
 Sir Harry Johnston believes that the survival of such an archaic form as the newly discovered okapi in the Semliki forest is due to the absence there of large carnivora, as we'll as to the infre- ouent visits of men. But it Is we'll known that great forests do not as a rule hold much life, and that where there is little food large carnivora are always scarce. The absence Ol llous and leopards from the great Congo for ests has not promoted animal life there in any degree A minor difficulty, which apparently is not real diff1cul- ty in this extraordinary gathering of is the relation of the eaten to the eaters How Is it that with lions so common and the deaths and devour- ing of their fellows constantly before their eyes the animals do not suffer from constant terror and nerve excite ment and a haunting fear of death? It | would not be a cause for surprise if all these defenceless creatures dispersed and departed from patures haunted by their deadliet foes. Yet they do not, l and show no nervousness or besetting fear. The answer probably is that they look on these incidents as we look | on the daily death rate, as something absolutely normal. There are riverine | tribes in Africa which lose members weekly by crocodiles, just as herd Of | zebras loses it's members by lions, and | are as indifferent to the accidents as are the beasts.-Spectator