AFRICAN ELEPHANTS

"The writings of Harris and Gordon Cumming contain such full and nauseating details of indiscriminate slaughter of wild animals, that one wonders to see almost every African book sense besmeared with feeble imitation of these great hunters' tales. Some tell of escapes from situations which, from our knowledge of the nature of the animals, it requires a painful stretch of charity to believe ever existed, even in dreams; and others of deeds which lead one to conclude that the proportion of 'born butchers,' in the population, is as great as of public-housekeepers to the people in Glasgow. "The amount of ivory taken to the marts of the world shows that about 30,000 elephants are annually slain. It is highly probable, that as the great size of the ears exhibited on Roman coins prove the animals in use by that nation to have been African, and not of the Asiatic species, they must have been trained by negroes in the interior of Africa. This is the more likely, inasmuch as there is no instance on record of ancient Europeans daring to tame this animal. Never , since the time of the Romans and Carthaginians, has the African elephant been tamed, though it was believed to be much more sagacious than the Asiatic species." P.197, "The Batoka," NARRATIVE OF AN EXPEDITION TO THE ZAMBESI by David and Charles Livingstone (1865)