HOW WILD ANIMALS DIE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4826, 23 March 1925, Page 1

HOW WILD ANIMALS DIE.

VIOLENT ENO THE RHEE. Violent deaths are the rule, not the exception, in Nature's realm. Even those great, leviathans of the deep, the whales, are not immune, for they are subject to the attacks of a ferocious creature called the killer, one of the dolphins, which hunts in packs, slashing the'chosen victim with theiiterrible jaws until it dies fr,om exhaustion and loss of blood. In temperate climates an extra hard winter causes many deaths, particularly among small .birds and animals, and droughts levy a great toll in hot countries. The wild creatures, have their epidemics, too (declares Kennetli Dawson in the Daily Maily). The rinderpest, or cattle plague, has in the past exterminated both domestic animals and the wild game over enormous tracts of Africa. In England foxes are subject to outbreaks of mange, which kill, them off wholesale, and ,a few years ago squirrels .were wiped out in many districts of the West of England by a species of footrot.

But for many of Nature’s creatures death comes swift and red. Even the great cats, the lions and'tigers, are no exceptions. While in their prime they have few enemies, but when feeble with age, with claws and teeth worn down and useless, they fall, victims to the hyenas and jackals which for years have fed on the leavings of the great beasts’ kills. Accidental deaths, too, are plentiful among the birds, beasts, and fishes Only recently two of the Canard liners, the Scythia, and the Berengaria, have each killed a whale by ramming it.

Not long ago a case was recorded of a swallow being killed by taking artificial fiy on an angler’s cast which had been left hanging from the branch of a tree. Birds which swallow their prey whole, like the heron ’and cormorant, are notv and then choked by trying to gulp down too large a morsel. Fitsh die the same way, especially pike and trout, and tiic large- carnivorae arc. sometimes fatally injured by the horns of an antelope they have attacked. Some years ago I found a blackbird ‘pierced by a long spike in the middle of a blackthorn bush. No doubt the bird had dashed in there to avoid the swoop of a ha.wk, and had impaled itself. - Birds which line their nests with horsehair or sheep’s wool occasionally get entangled in these materials, and are either hanged or die of starvation.

Foxes are not infrequently caught in snares, and, although they break away, if the wire is drawn tight round the neck it will in time eat into the flesh and kill the luckless creatures. Ra<s when frightened sometimes bolt into small pipes and become tightly wedged.