MAN—THE KILLER.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5398, 11 March 1929, Page 3

MAN—THE KILLER.

THE WORLD’S WILD LIFE.

GRADUAL EXTERMINATION.

Animal life is dwindling on the earth; dwinding fast. With the exception of a few animals, that man, selfishly, finds useful for commercial purposes, mammalian life is becoming rapidly exterminated. r . Of the destruction of. wild mammalian life on a universal scale there can be, unhappily, no doubt. We have first of all to record the total disappearance of such animals and birds as the blue buc,k, the qiiagga, Burchell’s zebra, Stellqr’s sea-cow, some of the great, land tortoises, and' others, and if students of evolution do not take quick steps these vanished ones can only be the precursors of a. host. The Indian gazelle has: beeji reduced to a very fine number, by the method’ of driving, the terrified animals into ravines with nets stretched 1 across them.

The story of the decline in the wonderful and varied! mammalian, fauna of Afric,a has, been so gloomily a dramatic one that knowledge elf it is more widely distributed. The work of. the hide merchant, the ivory hunter, the trader in captive animals, the irresponsible big game hunter, the settler, and the blinded tsetse-fly expert has been done to that degrqe of efficiency which has excluded dom and humanity. Only thirty or forty animals remain of. the gr.eat elephant herds that once roamed thq highlands of the Ado in South Afriqa. The demand for leather from zebras resulted in the destruction, over a very short time, of. 12,000 head in one small district. When the theory wag dominant that the ravages of the tsetse-fly could only be checked by grand-scale battues against, large animals, incredible holocausts were made of them, reminding one of the huge massacres of bison in America. Similarly have hhe numbers; of gor-> iila,s, giraffes, and antelopes been reduced from the richest abundance io verge of extinction. The use of colubus and blue monkey skins by the fur trade hat; had’ a like disastrous effect upon their numbers. Whither and however far we travel north and south, east and west, from land to s.ea and jungle to desert, we are confronted with the same version. It was calculated in 1925 that not more than 250 musk oxen had: survived throughout the whole Amelie,an Arctic, palar and grizzly bears, onc.e common animals, will soon have become legendary. Even more lamentable is the dimunition o f. the sea mammals, the fur seal herds, and the sea-ejephant in particular, and, as is well-known, the sperm whales. The spread of civilisation is often quoted as the inevitable c.ause for this impoverishment, whereas a consultation' of data reveals that commerce is the real Angel of Death.