'I am always fascinated by the confused thought processes of your average shrieking liberal,' Sean intervened and Claudia turned on him gleefully, lusting for battle. 'There is no confusion in my mind. You are here to kill animals.'

'The same way that a farmer kills animals,' Sean agreed. 'To ensure a healthy flourishing herd, and a place for that herd to survive.'

'You are not a farmer.'

'Oh yes, I am,' Sean contradicted. 'The only difference is that I slaughter them on the range, not in an abattoir, but like any farmer, my chief concern is the survival of my breeding-stock.'

"They are not domestic animals,' Claudia contested. 'Those are beautiful wild animals.'

'Beautiful? Wild? What the hell has that got to do with it? Like anything else in this modern world, the wild game of Africa has to pay its way if it's going to survive. Capo, here, is paying tens of thousands of dollars to hunt a lion and an elephant. He is giving those animals a monetary value far above goats and cattle, so that the newly independent government of Zimbabwe is willing to set aside concessions of millions of acres in which the game can persist. I hire one of those concessions, and I have the strongest incentive in the world for protecting it from the grazers and poachers and making certain I have plenty of game to offer my hunters. No, ducky, legal safari hunting is one of the most effective arms of conservation in Africa today.'

'So you are going to save the animals by shooting them with high-powered rifles?' Claudia demanded scornfully.

'High-powered rifles?' Sean laughed softly. 'Another emotive liberal parrot cry. Would you prefer us to use low-powered rifles? Won't that be rather like demanding that the butcher uses only blunt knives to cut throats? You are an intelligent woman, think with your head, not your heart. The individual animal is unimportant. His life span is limited to a few short years. In the case of this lion we are hunting, probably twelve years at the very most. What is beyond price is the continued existence of the species as a whole. Not the individual, but his entire kind. Our lion is an old male at the very end of his useful life span during which he has protected his females and his young and already added his genes to the pool of his race. He will die naturally within the next year or two. Much better that his death produce ten thousand dollars in cash which will be spent on providing a safe place for his cubs to live, than having this wilderness encroached upon by swarming black humanity and their scrawny herds of goats.'

'My God, listen to you.' Claudia shook her head sadly. ' "Swarming black humanity", those are the words of a racist and a bigot. It's their land, why can't they be free to live where they choose?'

'And that is the logic of woolly-headed liberalism,' Sean laughed. 'Make up your mind whose side you are on, the beautiful wild animals or the beautiful wild blacks. You can't have it both ways; when the two come into competition for living space, the wild animals always come off losers, unless we hunters can pay the bill for them.'

From A Time to Die by Wilbur Smith copyright 1989