The practice of introducing an alien species of animal or plant to a
new habitat involves varying degrees of domestication, and either physiological
or genetic adaptation. During the 19th century, this practice, known as
acclimatisation, was a typical manifestation of the enthusiasm for nature
and science which had seized countries such as Britain and France.

Christopher Lever’s book gives a history of the people who were the
prime movers of acclimatisation, and of the scientific societies which
they formed to promote the practice. Most of them were the nobility and
the landed gentry, with just a sprinkling of gifted scientists, and there
is a certain fascination in reading the lists of famous and titled names.
There is not much information about the fate of the animals themselves.
For these details the reader would have to look at the author’s standard
reference works on Naturalised Animals of the British Isles, (1977) Naturalised
Mammals of the World (1985) and Naturalised Birds of the World (1987).

The Acclimatisation Society of the United Kingdom had a surprisingly
short history, from 1860 to 1865. At the time, there were serious economic
pressures to look for new and more productive ways of providing food. The
disasters of the potato blight and the Corn Laws were recent memories, and
there was the problem of malnutrition in a rapidly growing, industrialising
society.

One of the founding members of the society was a zoologist called Frank
Buckland, who had a morbid interest in eating everything that moved, from
moles to bluebottles. Another leading light was Richard Owen, an anatomist
and palaeontologist best remembered for his interest in fossil animals,
who organised the 1860 inaugural dinner in London.

Roast eland took pride of place on the menu, as these antelopes had
already been introduced to Britain and excited some interest as potential
new domestic animals. Afterwards, Owen wrote of the eland: ‘Seeing the rapidity
with which it arrives at maturity, its weight and its capacity for feeding,
it is quite possible that before the expiration of the century it may be
removed from the category of animals of luxury to the more solid and useful
list of the farm.’

For five stormy years the society was riven with conflicts over policy
and personality. Scientific arguments were divided broadly between pure
science and the applied variety. There were financial troubles, and the
society was disbanded. Perhaps the most serious epitaph was written by J.
E. Gray: ‘Some of the schemes of the would-be acclimatisers are incapable
of being carried out, and would never have been suggested if their promoters
had been better acquainted with the habits and manners of the animals on
which the experiments are proposed to be made.’

In France, the Societe Zoologique d’Acclimatation, founded in 1854,
had a longer and more successful history. Its motivation, even more so
than in Britain, was to find new sources of food. During its early history
it was heavily involved in setting up zoological collections, for the public
as well as for scientific study. Today it has survived as one of France’s
main conservation organisations.

Both France and Britain spawned acclimatisation societies in nearly
all their colonies. The main motive was to seek out resources which could
be sent back to enrich the mother country. Nevertheless, there was also
an interest in enriching the colony itself, and this was nowhere more evident
than in New Zealand. The history of this country’s societies is particularly
well documented, and is recounted in the book. Each area had its own acclimatisation
society, and much of their activity was devoted to introducing familiar
fauna and flora from home.

There was even an acclimatisation society in Russia. It was founded
in 1858, drawing heavily on French science and culture, which were very
influential in Russia at that time. It survived until the Stalinist era,
although it was always beset with the same internal arguments which brought
an early death to the British society. In Russia, the two poles of the acclimatisation
debate were the furthest apart.

At one end of the spectrum were those arguing for the ‘Stalin plan
for the great transformation of nature’, under which the Communist Party
would organise the conversion of the land and ecology for Russia to become
the food provider of the world. At the other end were those who believed
that the cost of upsetting the balance of nature in this way could be more
far-reaching than people imagined. In other words, some individuals were
already arguing fiercely for conservation. Lever tells us that the society’s
president did not mention acclimatisation when he addressed its jubilee
conference in 1908. Instead he ‘spoke passionately of the urgent necessity
of preserving, in a system of State reserves, what remained of virgin habitats
and native animals’.

Perhaps one of the most interesting lessons of Lever’s book is that
ideas which we regard as essentially modern – such as conservation or ostrich
farming in Britain – have been around for well over a hundred years. Lever
has collected a wealth of detail about the people and organisations that
made the early trials, and most of the information is not readily available
from any other source.

Russell Kyle is is a veterinary surgeon specialising in economic management
of wildlife.

The animal kingdom is very important to human economy. On the one hand,
we derive economic benefits from exploiting animals, and on the other, suffer
from crop damage, diseases and other predations which animals wreak upon
us.

People living in the developed world, though, are often unaware of their
vital dependence upon both the animal and plant kingdoms. In urban societies,
people tend to be remote from nature, with a relatively small proportion
of the population working in agriculture. Many Western children believe
that milk is produced in the carton-packing plant and bread originates from
a baking factory.

In the developing world the vast majority of people work directly in
agriculture, and they need no reminder that their survival depends upon
exploiting the benefits and limiting the ravages of the natural world. B.
S. Jangi’s dictionary, Economic Zoology, is mostly concerned with that part
of the world where the correct management of the animal kingdom can be a
matter of life and death for human beings.

The 1500 entries are not intended to be an exhaustive list but rather
a representative selection, and to some extent an introduction to the subject.
On the first page under Acanthocephala there is a brief description of the
giant spiny-headed worm, Macrocanthorhynchus hirudinaceus, and its pathogenic
effect on pigs. The entry does not mention, however, that this worm is found
only in central and southern America and parts of Asia, and is absent from
western Europe and most of northern America. This indicates the main focus
of interest of the book.

B. S. Jangi has set himself the almost impossible task of selection.
The rodent order alone contains 5000 species, and yet the book is limited
to only 1500 entries to cover the entire animal kingdom. This will mean
that a reader who hopes to use the book as a comprehensive reference source
will be disappointed to find many animals are not listed.

Another difficulty for the author is that, because the book is designed
as a quick reference rather than a detailed source of information in depth,
the amount of text devoted to each entry has to be limited. Thus many entries
are described in no more detail than one would find in a good dictionary
– for example, ‘Pathogen: a disease-producing agent such as an organism
or a substance, usually the former.’

Some entries are described in extensive detail, perhaps reflecting Jangi’s
own enthusiasms. Pelecypoda, a class of Mollusca, receives more than a page
of description including some intriguing incidental facts, such as ‘the
extract of the digestive diverticula of the edible clam Mya arenaria has
antiviral activity, and the quahog produces an anti-tumour substance’.

The book must be welcomed as an attempt to help people to appreciate
the animal kingdom and to value its importance to human economy. With the
selection of entries particularly biased towards animals of most importance
in the developing world, that is where it is likely to be most valued, and
particularly where a detailed reference library may not be readily available.

*A. A. Balkema Uitgevers BV, Postbus 1675, NL-3000 BR Rotterdam, The
Netherlands.

Russell Kyle is a veterinary surgeon specialising in economic management
of wildlife.

At first sight, Science and Empire is about no more than a tiresome
tropical parasite with little relevance to anyone outside the safari belt
of southern and East Africa. However, Paul Cranefield spurns such a limited
view: he uses the disease as a base from which to explore several wider
topics.

Chief among these is the colonial history of southern Africa – the literary
device of getting an insight into that history through the story of a disease
is strikingly effective. Other aspects of the story are the tale of detection
as scientists search for the cause and solution of a new disease; a social
study of its effects on African cattle-owning tribes and European immigrant
farmers; a biographical account of the personal rivalries as well as the
cooperation of some of the great names in the early boom years of bacteriology;
and finally a scientific monograph on the disease.

Clearly, Cranefield’s evident enthusiasm is based on the fact that the
story draws in so many varied features. The wealth of his research into
original source documents in London, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Germany and
elsewhere is prodigious. He quotes and lists the sources in such detail
that the book is a valuable historical record.

In 1896 a devastating plague of rinderpest killed most of the cattle
in Rhodesia. The development of colonial authority was then in an uncertain
state. Cecil Rhodes’s powers were failing (he eventually died in 1902).
The Chartered Company of Rhodesia supported the introduction of replacement
cattle from sources as varied as the nearby German colony of Tanganyika
and the distant stock of Australia.

In 1901 this tender young population of newly introduced cattle was
again struck down by an entirely new disease. It proved equally fatal; this
was East Coast Fever. The first instinct of the company was to deny the
existence of the disease for fear of discouraging investment. Almost a year
of dithering and argument followed between the Colonial Office in London,
the Chartered Company and officials in Rhodesia and South Africa, revolving
around one question: who should they appoint to study the disease and propose
a solution?

The eventual favourite was Robert Koch, renowned as one of the most
eminent bacteriologists of the time (he received a Nobel prize in 1905 for
his work on tuberculosis). A serious problem, however, was that Koch was
German, and in the imperial domain British-German rivalry was bitter. One
of the strongest opponents to Koch was Joseph Chamberlain, colonial secretary
and father of the more famous Neville who proved even more unfortunate in
his contacts with Germany. A chapter is devoted to Chamberlain’s background,
and the reason for his nationalism.

Koch was eventually appointed but, unfortunately, East Coast Fever was
one of his least successful projects. He came to some wrong conclusions,
which delayed the correct diagnosis and management of the problem by a few
years.

It was evident that the disease is caused by a protozoan which circulates
in the blood, and is transmitted by a tick. Koch decided, wrongly, that
it was simply a virulent strain of Texas redwater fever, which is transmitted
by the blue tick, Rhipi-cephalus dicoloratus. But the protozoan involved
in East Coast Fever is an entirely different species, and is transmitted
by the brown tick, R. appendiculatus.

The difference proved important because the ticks’ life cycles differ,
as do the methods of transmission. Koch also claimed to have developed a
method of immunisation by inoculation, which subsequently turned out to
be ineffective.

The book describes in detail the processes that misled Koch, and follows
through the work of later scientists who finally arrived at the truth. The
major credit is due to an American-born entomologist called Charlie Lounsbury,
and a Swiss-born vet called Arnold Theiler. The protozoan responsible for
East Coast Fever is now called Theileria parva in recognition of his work.

From 1903 the arguments became concerned more with the control of the
disease than with its cause. The methods imposed at that time are still
used: compulsory slaughter of infected herds with compensation paid by the
government, secure fencing to isolate infected herds or districts, and strict
control over the movement of stock between districts.

Cattle occupy a special place in the philosophy of many African tribal
groups, and the disease has political connotations for them. They had regarded
rinderpest as something that Europeans had introduced to undermine their
cattle cultures, and similar suspicions about East Coast Fever helped to
inflame several uprisings in the colonies.

Even today its economic effect is strong because there is no satisfactory
immunisation method. Half a million cattle still die from the disease every
year in East and Central Africa. In Zimbabwe, 5.5 million cattle have to
be dipped in insecticide every week to control the brown tick.

Considering how comprehensively the book draws in so many other issues,
it is extra-ordinary that there is not a single mention of the wild animals
of Africa. An obvious question is whether they act as a reservoir for the
protozoan. After finding this omission, I turned to the index and was surprised
to find not a single mention of antelope, buffalo or other wildlife. Yet
we know that the African buffalo, Syncerus caffer, acts as a largely unaffected
host for the protozoan. Many antelopes also provide the main source of subsistence
for the brown tick.

This small omission hardly detracts from the success of a book that
accomplishes a difficult task: to combine a factual and scientific history
of a disease with colonial history, social history and biography. Cranefield
manages to do it within a text that is accessible to a layperson and also
reads as an intriguing narrative of detection.

Russell Kyle is a vet. He writes on the exploitation of wild animals.

THE 1960s were the most euphoric time for wildlife science. Interest
in the abundance of wild animals was booming, especially in Africa, and
field studies of their ecology were the fashion. An exciting bonus from
the field research was the possibility that wild animals could become a
vast new source of food for the malnourished in the developing world, where
the greatest populations of wild animals were still to be found.

Much of the optimism of the early days was, frankly, based on bad science.
In 1965, for example, one much quoted paper estimated the biomass of wild
animals in parts of Uganda, and concluded: ‘These high carrying capacities
of wildlife in East Africa far exceed those of the best livestock ranges
and may be the highest on record for terrestrial areas.’ But a researcher
had made a mistake with a decimal point, over-estimating the amount of animals
the terrain supported by a factor of 10. Another common mistake in early
schemes to exploit wild animals was inaccurate population monitoring, which
led to a catastrophic decline in the numbers of local animals soon after
cropping began.

Wildlife Production Systems shows how the naive optimism of those early
days has matured. The book developed out of a symposium at the Fourth International
Theriological Congress in Alberta, Canada, in 1985. During the past two
decades the study of wildlife production found a much sounder scientific
base, as the wealth of research in this book shows. The contributors are
also far more restrained in their analysis of the future of wildlife production.

Estimates of the present-day contribution of wild animals (excluding
fish) to human consumption of meat are very modest, at about 0.5 per cent
of meat production from domestic animals. Clearly, we should be able to
increase its output usefully; this could also be significant but only in
countries that have a wildlife population to exploit. None of the contributors,
however, claim any greater, global potential for wild meat.

There are two features that recur repeatedly throughout the book. Firstly,
researchers now recognise the skill and understanding of local hunting communities
who have always lived by exploiting wild animals. Henry Lewis, University
of Alberta, makes a fascinating comparison between the subtle use of fire
by aboriginals in Northern Australia, compared to the much less intelligent
range-burning policies of the cattle ranchers. David Klein, University of
Alaska, discusses how the US’s northern communities of native Americans
may need to adapt between one prey species and another as the abundance
of musk-oxen, reindeer, small mammals, fish and marine mammals fluctuate;
if the hunters’ luck or judgment run out, they may well starve.

The crucial importance of fees from sport-hunting for the economics
of wild animal management is the second common theme. David Cummings, of
Zimbabwe’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management, outlines
this particularly well. Zimbabwe is undoubtedly the most successful country
in Africa at managing its stocks of wild animal for the combined benefits
of meat production, conservation, tourism and sport-hunting. Government
licences for commercial hunting cover 13 per cent of the area of Zimbabwe
and the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management controls the
killing quotas strictly. In 1985, Zimbabwe earned $4.2 million from visiting
safari hunters, compared with $18.6 million for its beef exports.

I found it interesting that all the papers dealing with North American
ungulates, from reindeer in the far North of the continent to introduced
exotics in Texas, stress that the animal welfare lobby will need to be reassured
before land owners can take the exploitation of wild animals for meat much
further. This becomes easy to understand when one reads, in the chapter
on bison, that there is a strong demand from recreational hunters to be
allowed to shoot captive bison held on ranches.

I was disappointed, however, by the book’s scant geographic coverage.
Africa and North America dominate, and there are almost no references to
Asia and South America. There was little mention of the technicalities of
slaughter, meat inspection, carcase preservation and marketing. These practical
topics are important because neglecting any of them has caused the failure
of many cropping projects.

These omissions do not detract, however, from the value of what the
book does cover. It is particularly useful on the deer family: entire sections
are devoted to reindeer in all loca tions around the Arctic circle and to
farming captive deer around the world. Other chap ters concentrate on the
moose and the musk-deer. There is also much detail on international trade,
conservation and the social aspects of the local exploit ation of wild animals.

The editors have drawn together more than 30 contributors, and they
provide an authoritative review of the present state of the economic utilisation
of wild ungulates. There is plenty of carefully collected data to support
the general conclusion that there is still room for a modest but locally
valuable increase in food production from wild ungulates. And, thanks to
excellent subediting, a uniform style and quality informs all the contributions.
The result is a book that is highly readable, as well as being a valuable
scientific reference.

Russell Kyle is a lecturer in the Large Animal Practice of the Royal
Veterinary College and a consultant in management projects for wild ungulates.