THE AFRICAN BUFFALO

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2337, 4 October 1921, Page 1

THE AFRICAN BUFFALO

MOST VINDICTIVE ANIMAL.

STORIES OF THE HUNT.

The buffalo is different from any other kind of animal in Africa. A lion prefers not to fight a man. He almost never attacks unprovoked, and even when he does attack he is not vindictive. The elephant, like the lion, prefers to be left alone. But he is quicker to attack man than the lion, and lie is not satisfied merely to knock out his man enemy. Complete destruction is his aim. The buffalo is even quicker than the elephant to take offence at man, and he is as keen-sighted, clever, and vindictive as the elephant. As a matter of fact, writes Carl Akeley in the World’s Work, the domesticated bull is more likely to attack a man without provocation than any wild animal. I know, and those who wandered around the bulls on our Western prairies in the old cattle days on foot probably experienced the same kind of . charges one gets from African buffaloes.

Nevertheless, despite all these qualities which are almost universally attributed to the African buffalo, I am confident that the buffalo, like the elephant and other wild animals, has no instinctive enmity to man. That enmity, I am sure, is acquired by experience. I had jin experience with a‘ band of elephants on the Aberdare Plateau that had seen little or nothing of man, and until they learned about men from me they paid no more attention to me than if I had been an antelope. But after I had shot one or two as specimens, they acquired the traditional elephant attitude. I had a curiously similar experience with buffaloes.

Although on our buffalo hunting we have never had any actually serious encounters, I fully appreei-ate-that the buffalo deserves his reputation as one of the most dangerous of big game animals. His eyesight is good, he has keen scent, and is vigilent and vindictive. While the lion is usually satisfied with giving his victim a knock-out blow or bite, the buffalo, when once on the trail of man, will not only persist-in his efforts to find him, but, when he has once come up with him, will not leave while there is a vestige of life remaining in the victim. In some cases he will not leave while there is a fragment of the man remaining large enough, to form a target for a buffalo’s stamping hoofs.

A hunter I met once told me of an experience he had with a buffalo, which shows in rather a terrible way these characteristics of the animal. He and a companion wounded a buffalo and followed it into the long grass. It was lurking where they did not expect it, and with a sudden charge it was upon them before they had a. chance to shoot. The buffalo knocked down the man who told me the story, and then rushed after his companion. The first victim managed to climb a tree, although without his gun. By that time the other man was dead. But the buffalo was not satisfied. For two hours he stamped and tossed the remains, while the wounded man in the tree sat helplessly watching. When the buffalo left, my informant told me, the only evidence of his friend was the trampled place on the ground where the tragedy had taken place. There is nothing in Africa more vindictive than this.

There was another case of an old elephant-hunter in Uganda who shot a buffalo for meat. The bullet did not kill the animal, and it retreated into the thick hush where there were even some good-sized trees. The old hunter followed along a path. Suddenly the buffalo caught him and tossed him. As he went into the air he grasped some branches overhanging the trail. There he hung, unable to get up, and afraid to drop down, while the wild bull beneath him charged back and forth with his long horns ripping at the hunter’s legs. Happily the gun-bov came up in time to save his master by killing. the beast. This hunter was an "extraordinary character. He was very successful, and yet he was almost stone deaf. How he dared hunt elephants or any other big game without the aid of his hearing I have never been able to conceive, yet he did it, and did it well.