Photo by York & Son] [Notting Hill.
FEMALE HIPPOPOTAMUSES.
Exhibits a very characteristic attitude of the animal.
Photo by York & Son] [Notting Hill.
A HIPPOPOTAMUS FAMILY—FATHER, MOTHER, AND YOUNG.
Hippopotamuses are very sociable animals, and are often to be met with in large herds.
Once, in August, 1880, I came upon a native tribe engaged in starving to death a herd of hippopotamuses in a pool of the Umniati River, in Northern Mashonaland. When I came on the scene, there were ten hippopotamuses still alive in the pool. Eight of these appeared to be standing on a sandbank in the middle of the river, as more than half their bodies were above the water. They were all huddled up together, their heads resting on each other's bodies. Two others were swimming about, each with a heavily shafted assegai sticking in its back. Besides these ten still living hippopotamuses two dead ones were being cut up on the side of the pool, and many more must already have been killed, as all round the pool festoons of meat were hanging on poles to dry, and a large number of natives had been living for some time on nothing but hippopotamus-meat. Altogether I imagine that a herd of at least twenty animals must have been destroyed. Much as one must regret such a wholesale slaughter, it must be remembered that this great killing was the work of hungry savages, who at any rate utilised every scrap of the meat thus obtained, and much of the skin as well, for food; and such an incident is far less reprehensible—indeed, stands on quite a different plane as regards moral guilt—to the wanton destruction of a large number of hippopotamuses in the Umzingwani River, near Bulawayo, within a few months of the conquest of Matabililand by the Chartered Company's forces in 1893. These animals had been protected for many years by Lo Bengula and his father Umziligazi before him; but no sooner were the Matabili conquered and their country thrown open to white men than certain unscrupulous persons destroyed all but a very few of these half-tame animals, for the sake of the few paltry pieces of money their hides were worth!
Photo by G. W. Wilson & Co., Ltd.] [Aberdeen.