PART V. wu7
cultivator to go far afield and kill game where it was doing no harm.
The natives who suffered most from game were those who, in order to
evade their tribal obligations or for other reasons, slipped away into
the bush and lived in small isolated settlements. He always understood
 that it was the policy of District Officers to discourage such
evasions. Where native population was dense, e.g., the Eastern
Province of Uganda and the Kavirondo and Kikuyu reserves in Kenya
game automatically disappeared; yet he had never heard that in these
areas the soil had become exhausted. As far as he knew the only
place in Kenya where there was any possibility of serious damage being
done by game was on the Athi Plains and with regard to that area a
scheme had been proposed for fencing off the game and he hoped that
it would soon be possible to carry this into effect.
The question of trypanosomiasis and game was still such a vexed
one that he submitted the Conference were not justified in coming to
any definite decision. He was prepared to agree that indiscriminate
and uncontrolled preservation of game could not go hand in hand with
agriculture.
Mr. SIMPSON stated that, so far as he was aware, game was not
a menace to agricultural progress in Uganda.
(Captain Caldwell left the meeting.)
SIGNOR GRILLO said that in the Province of Mozambique,
game shooting was allowed during certain months of the year, and,
at times, during the whole period of the year, in some districts with
free licences. To keep the game off the principal cultivated areas had
been borne.in mind, with a view to preventing as much as possible
the transmission of trypanosomiasis. It was indisputable that the
game caused considerable damage, particularly in native cutlivations,
but the danger of contamination of the disease to cattle assumed a
certain considerable importance in agriculture and stock-breeding.
He, therefore, offered some observations on the subject.
A great portion of East Africa was covered with forests, where the
tsetse fly lived. Where it existed the cattle could not thrive, at least
within economical lines which should guide agricultural exploration
and live stock breeding. On those lines cultivation by Europeans was
either rendered impossible or had a precarious character, and transitory
in case of annual cultivations. The indigenous cultivation was also
very poor and deficient. The systematic devastation of game,
besides being an excessively expensive undertaking, did not result in
clearing the region, except in very rare cases. The only sure
process of destroying or making the fly to disappear was deforestation.
Only in few particular cases this might be deemed advisable. Thus,
until a process of immunisation against the disease was discovered,
in its various forms, the land with tsetse fly would remain useless.
He thought that an experiment might be advisable to domesticate
certain kinds of wild animals for their use in eultivations in the
infected areas; he referred to elephant, eland, buffalo, and zebra. In
Mozambique animals of the first three kinds had already been
domesticated.

IR