FOOTNOTES:
[21] This article originally appeared in the Daily Mail of February 8, 1905.
BIG-GAME HUNTING
By ERNEST BELL
“If asked why I had gone elephant-hunting at the age of nineteen, I would say that it is simply because I am the lineal descendant of a prehistoric man.”
F. C. Selous.
Apparently there is a considerable public who like reading books about the slaughter of what is called “big game,” or we should hardly have such a continuous supply of them issued from the press. As, however, vanity is apparently no small incentive to the deeds of the big-game hunters, it is perhaps a fair deduction that the same feeling may have something to do with the publication of their records, and that such books are in fact not always speculations on the part of publishers, but are sometimes printed by the authors themselves.
Certainly the unbiassed reader might be excused for agreeing with the sentiment expressed in the preface of one of the exponents of the art, when he writes: “I shall guard myself against the desire to make the reader be present at the death of my 500 victims, which would be very monotonous to him, for after all, though circumstances may vary, the result of a hunt after wild animals is always the same.”
A study of several books of the sort certainly confirms the impression that the subject is a very monotonous one. The illustrations also share the same want of variety, for almost all represent dead animals, varied only by the arrangement of guns and naked savages about them. They apparently illustrate nothing at all but the one fact—which one would think was neither surprising nor creditable—that the perpetrators, with the aid of Express double-barrelled rifles, Winchester six-shot repeaters, revolvers, explosive bullets, smokeless powder, rockets, the electric projector, Bengal lights, etc., and a band of natives to load and work the machinery, succeed in destroying the lives of some more beautiful animals. As it is expressed by one author: “At the very spot where a minute before there rose, in all its savage beauty, this majestic conception of Nature, the largest and the most powerful of the animals of the earth, nothing more than a mass of grey flesh appears in the blood-spattered grass.” The climax is reached when we see the “hero,” as sometimes happens, sitting with proud mien on the top of some huge animal, not apparently realizing that the same juxtaposition which brings out the size of the animal is apt to suggest also the smallness of the man whose greatest pride and delight can be wantonly to destroy so grand a creature. We must beg to differ with this writer’s enthusiastic exclamation that elephant-hunting is certainly “the greatest and noblest sport in the world.” Rather we should be inclined to call it the meanest and most contemptible abuse of man’s superior powers.