Inquiries Among The Bushmen And Bakalahari, Who Are Intimately Acquainted
With The Habits Of The Game, Lead To The Belief That Many Diseases Prevail
Among Wild Animals.
I have seen the kokong or gnu, kama or hartebeest,
the tsessebe, kukama, and the giraffe, so mangy as to be uneatable
even by the natives.
Reference has already been made to the peripneumonia
which cuts off horses, tolos or koodoos. Great numbers also of zebras
are found dead with masses of foam at the nostrils, exactly as occurs
in the common "horse-sickness". The production of the malignant carbuncle
called kuatsi, or selonda, by the flesh when eaten, is another proof
of the disease of the tame and wild being identical. I once found a buffalo
blind from ophthalmia standing by the fountain Otse; when he attempted to run
he lifted up his feet in the manner peculiar to blind animals.
The rhinoceros has often worms on the conjunction of his eyes;
but these are not the cause of the dimness of vision which will make him
charge past a man who has wounded him, if he stands perfectly still,
in the belief that his enemy is a tree. It probably arises from the horn
being in the line of vision, for the variety named kuabaoba,
which has a straight horn directed downward away from that line,
possesses acute eyesight, and is much more wary.
All the wild animals are subject to intestinal worms besides. I have observed
bunches of a tape-like thread and short worms of enlarged sizes
in the rhinoceros. The zebra and elephants are seldom without them,
and a thread-worm may often be seen under the peritoneum of these animals.
Short red larvae, which convey a stinging sensation to the hand,
are seen clustering round the orifice of the windpipe (trachea) of this animal
at the back of the throat; others are seen in the frontal sinus of antelopes;
and curious flat, leech-like worms, with black eyes, are found
in the stomachs of leches. The zebra, giraffe, eland, and kukama
have been seen mere skeletons from decay of their teeth
as well as from disease.
The carnivora, too, become diseased and mangy; lions become lean
and perish miserably by reason of the decay of the teeth.
When a lion becomes too old to catch game, he frequently takes to killing
goats in the villages; a woman or child happening to go out at night
falls a prey too; and as this is his only source of subsistence now,
he continues it. From this circumstance has arisen the idea that the lion,
when he has once tasted human flesh, loves it better than any other.
A man-eater is invariably an old lion; and when he overcomes his fear of man
so far as to come to villages for goats, the people remark,
"His teeth are worn, he will soon kill men." They at once acknowledge
the necessity of instant action, and turn out to kill him.
When living far away from population, or when, as is the case in some parts,
he entertains a wholesome dread of the Bushmen and Bakalahari,
as soon as either disease or old age overtakes him, he begins
to catch mice and other small rodents, and even to eat grass;
the natives, observing undigested vegetable matter in his droppings,
follow up his trail in the certainty of finding him scarcely able to move
under some tree, and dispatch him without difficulty.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 117 of 572
Words from 62652 to 63231
of 306638
