File:In search of prey, by Wilhelm Kuhnert, 1891.jpg

Identifier: storyofafricaits03brow (find matches)
Title: The story of Africa and its explorers
Year: 1892 (1890s)
Authors: Brown, Robert, 1842-1895
Subjects:
Publisher: London : Cassell
Contributing Library: University of Connecticut Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries

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share the fate which is rapidly over-taking Burchells allied species, and in alllikelihood has already befallen the quagga.IFNo harmless South African animal has beenmore crueUy persecuted than these character-istic species. They are so easily hunted todeath that it is scarcely an effort to bagthem, yet not only the Boers and the Kaffirshave slaughtered them in the most ruthless § Equns huvclielll. \\ Equvs zebra. H Equu.s. (Hippotigris) qnaggn. 172 THE STOBY OF AFRICA. manner, but English sportsmen have notbeen ashamed to boast of shootmg half adozen out of the herds of fifty or a hundred—seldom less than ten—in which Burchells zebrais found consorting with ostriches, brindledgnus, and hartebeests. The quagga is already bush which it inhabits is more closely ap-proached. The leopard J—the tiger of thecolonists—is still met with in the Transvaaland Bechuanaland hilly country, but in Nataland the Cape it is not likely to survive long.The cheetah § is another species doomed to
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IN SEARCH OF PREY. altogether, or almost, beyond the hope ofpreservation. Out of the herds which at onetime inhabited the upper portion of the CapeColony not one has been seen for several years ;for the animal commonly called quagga bythe Boers and the traders, and other un-scientific people imitating them, is reallyBurchells zebra. The wart hog,^ the representative of the more northern wild boars, is also greatly on the wane, while the bush hogt— never common—is likely before long to disappear altogether from Matabeleland, Mashonaland, Natal, and the Eastern Provinces of the Cape, when the dense * Phaeoclicerus cetliiopicus. t Sus larvatus. Hogs andcats. destruction in Natal and the Old Colony,and the serval,;; if it was ever common inSouth Africa, is now extremely rare. But it is perhaps the numerous species ofantelope which have their home in SouthAfrica that form the most charac-teristic features in its rapidly dim-inishing fauna. So amazingly numerous weresome of them that ev

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