The Preservation of the African Fauna and its Relation to Tropical Diseases 1

Abstract

WHEN educated opinion in Europe, especially in England, could take stock of the ravages of British and Boer hunters who were exterminating the wonderful mammalian fauna of South Africa, a movement set in in the opposite direction for pleading with the British, German, French, and Belgian Governments to discourage or prohibit the destruction of wild life in their African territories. This desire to preserve the fascinating aspects of wild nature began to take a more acute shape in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and various African administrators, who were naturalists as well as sportsmen, induced their Governments to allow them to proclaim certain areas in Africa to be game reserves in which more or less complete protection was afforded to beasts, birds, and reptiles. The British Foreign Office took up the matter in the early nineties, and through Sir Clement Hill and others made arrangements with European nations for the institution of game regulations throughout Africa which might check the devastating raids of sportsmen. The movement was accentuated by a revelation of the wonders of the equatorial East African fauna, which really rivalled those of Cape Colony and Natal in the days of Roualeyn Gordon Cumming.