“How about Cape buffalo?” “Yes, yes.” “I’ll bet a gazelle steak is nice.” “Oh, yes.” “Are warthogs any good to eat?” “Yes,” said John, “delicious.”
I wasn’t even going to ask about elephants. Lions, anyway, are horrible. I had a lion steak once, at a German restaurant in, of all places, Springfield, Massachusetts. The flavor was of militant liver. Keeping the conservation areas conserved is not just a matter of Tanzania sucking up to the International Wildlife Fund. Vast sections of Tanzania are infected with sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly. The fly’s devastating effects are similar to those of other known sleeping-sickness carriers, such as the tsetse professor, tsetse boss, and tsetse New York Times op-ed page writer. Sleeping sickness does not bother wild animals, but it does kill people and— something that’s more economically important in Tanzania than people are— domestic cattle. The Sierra Club’s travel guide to East Africa says, “A good number of African parks undoubtedly owe their existence not to an animal that humans wanted to preserve, but to one we couldn’t get rid of.” The tsetse is the size of a housefly but manages a bite like an enraged fox terrier. Dozens of them would get in the minivan and hang out behind the dome light and under the sun visors, waiting for their chance. Tobacco fumes seemed to be the only effective repellent. Cigarette packs should come with a printed message: “Smoking may prolong life in areas of tsetse fly infestation.” If we want to save Tanzania’s wildlife, we’d better do something about its poverty. Otherwise the Tanzanians may give up on safari tourism, spray the Ngorongoro, the Serengeti, and the Tarangire with DDT, and start playing the Bonanza theme song. Who wouldn’t rather be a cowboy than a busboy? In fact, no matter what our motives are for being appalled by Tanzanian poverty, we’d better do something about it. There’s suffering humanity to be considered. And that suffering humanity will be us if we’re not careful. Only a few million of the world’s people are relatively wealthy, but two billion live like the Tanzanians. One of these days those billion are going to figure out that they can buy guns in Florida without much of a background check. On my last night on safari, I gathered an armload of Serengeti beer and went to sit on the small terrace of my ground-floor hotel room. There was a stretch of
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