Abstract
THE problem of the disappearing fauna of Africa formed the subject of a lecture before the University of London Animal Welfare Society on March 7. It has been common knowledge for years that the status of many of the big African animals was precarious. The last quagga died in 1882, and the three big pachyderms have been killed off at an alarming rate. Not only are the indigenous beasts being wiped out under the ‘protecting’eye of a white civilization, but also the majority of many species are dying unnecessarily cruel deaths at the hands of the African native, working with old-fashioned guns and pitfalls and traps. Possibly only a few thousand gorillas remain alive to-day, in the Cameroons, where they are exploited by man, and in the Pare National Albert, where they are protected by the Belgian Government. The elephant has disappeared from most of its old haunts. In the three British dependencies a minimum of 6,000 a year are killed, chiefly in the ‘control campaign’. Tanganyika and the lake swamps are the last haunts of the hippopotamus, and unless help is forthcoming this will eventually disappear. On November 8, 1933, the London Convention for the Protection of the African Fauna and Flora was signed. The first of a series of subsequent international conferences should have taken place before November 1937. No conference has been held, the reason given being that the British Government intends to summon a conference on tropical Asia and the western Pacific, certain of the experts interested in those regions being also interested in Africa. At the meeting, the Society passed a resolution calling upon the Government to take urgent steps for summoning the London Convention for the Protection of the African Fauna promised for November 1937.
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The Disappearing Fauna of Africa. Nature 141, 443 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141443b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141443b0