Among Animals of Africa [antikvár]

Foreword We thus meet the artifice, as contemptible as it is brazen, whereby all the natural functions which animals have in common with us and which attest the identity of our nature with theirs, such as eating, drinking, pregnancy, birth, death, corpse, and others besides, are designated by quite different words in their case than in that of matt. This is a base trick indeed. ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (1788-I860) Of the many books which I have written in the past few decades, only four are devoted to Africa. This is the fifth. It describes recent personal experiences in Black Africa and contains sections on individual species found in that continent: elephants, large snakes, crocodiles, gorillas, giraffes, lions, camels, black and white rhinoceroses, ostriches, locusts, hyenas and wild dogs. I have endeavoured to summarize my own experiences together with current information about African fauna accruing from observations and research carried out by others. In so doing, I have become aware that the task is harder and demands more time and space than it would have done only a few years ago. It was not until i960, after the Black African countries had gained their independence, that biologists began to devote increasing attention to how the larger African animals live, how they cope with their environment, and what they need for survival. Zoologists can now be found throughout the national parks and whole teams of biologists are at work in the Serengeti Research Institute, just as they are in the newly founded universities of East Africa. In the old days, research was at best limited to pest control, in other words, to the question of how to cull or exterminate species cap-