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Originally Posted by Rizla
Why have twice downgraded the severity of the passage I am referring to?
First, you described it as big-game hunting. It clearly is not, and my initial post made it clear it was not. Big-game hunting does not involve the mass and needless slaughter of a herd. It is the tracking of a single animal.
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Because I'm afraid you're wrong, plain and simple. In the context of about what we're talking about here, which is the book "King Solomon's Mines", the protagonist of the book, Alan Quartermain, was a professional hunter who made money from killing as many elephants as possible, for their tusks. Big-game hunting at that time very much involved "mass slaughter", not killing single animals. Believe me, I've read all 60+ of Rider Haggard's novels (and collected them into a 16-volume omnibus edition for the MR library) and there are innumerable examples in them of the slaughter of immense numbers of animals. There are similar accounts in contemporary books by other authors. That really is what happened then, and it was considered to be absolutely normal.
African hunting by English Gentlemen in those days did not consist of stalking an animal. The Gentleman, accompanied by a professional hunter, would be comfortably ensconced in a shooting position, while a large number of natives went out to frighten herds of animals and drive them towards said Gentleman, who would then blaze away at them as they ran past him and attempt to kill as many as possible. There are numerous accounts of people killing 20, 30, or more elephants in a single day. The tusks would be cut out and the bodies just lot to rot.
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Second, you liken it to warfare, which, as I stated in my response, is clearly not the same thing at all.
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I find your sense of morals peculiar, in that you are disturbed by the depiction of the killing of animals, but not by the killing of human beings, which is surely a much worse act, is it not?