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| Location: |
Africa - Eastern Africa - Kenya |
| Subject: |
Distribution - Poaching |
| Species: |
Black Rhino |
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The following, from a report of a lecture by Capt. Keith Caldwell, Acting Game Warden of Kenya Colony, is extracted from the `East African Standard,' of August 28, 1926: `There were three kinds of people who killed game-the man who killed because animals were doing damage to his crops; the sportsman; and the man who shot game for profit. It was the third-named who was the great danger. . . . . What the lecturer termed the profit killer was on the increase today. A number of people were taking to game killing as a living, and the damage they were doing was incalculable. . . . . Every loophole put into the [game] ordinance to assist the genuine crop cultivator had been taken wrongful advantage of by the profit killers. . . . . Elephants with 100-1b. tusks were getting rarer and rarer. . . . . The quickest and most certain way of wiping animals off the face of the earth was to commercialize their trophies. . . . . The general scarcity of game in many of the uncultivated, uninhabited areas must strike anyone on safari nowadays, and the lecturer attributed that scarcity largely to the increase in the ranks of the profit killers. The country was now faced with a very definite choice: either to put the profit killers out of business or to let all the game go.
`Italian Somaliland was getting away with it was impossible to say how many thousand pounds of [Kenya] ivory, and if there were some sort of international agreement to prevent that sort of thing, Kenya would be much richer by the retention of elephants. . . . . A powerful international agreement with apowerful international organization was needed to stop indiscriminate traffic in big game trophies. He hoped this was a question with which the League of Nations would occupy itself. If you make ivory a government monopoly, and have a proper agreement under the League of Nations, with someone appointed to bring abuses to light, then there will be some hope of saving the game of Africa from being commercialized. Once the big game is gone, it can never be replaced; it is gone absolutely and forever.'
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Extract of a lecture
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