Bring ’em Back Alive 391 nose and turned it great dark eyes on me. I was lost . . . . I shall never forget the long and depressing struggle I had with these little antelope” (91-92). The animals die not from his capture, but native hunting practices that he both understands and condemns. Their experience with the delicate antelopes exemplifies the ongoing conflict they have with local people—on one hand, they need their expertise and labor to help catch and care for the animals, and on the other, they are at odds with the local superstitions and hunting customs that appear to have no restraints on what, when, or how many animals can be killed. All the animals they capture are local people’s food—as Durrell emphasizes in Cameroon where all types of wildlife are referred to as “beef”. He acknowledges the luxury of pursuing animals for either pleasure or scientific knowledge, but after becoming devoted fulltime to insuring species survival, he battles all humans who are not fighting on his side, harping on the pressures of human overpopulation in the Global South rather than the capitalist agenda of overconsumption in the Global North. Buck, working under the presumption of animal abundance, is rarely troubled by thoughts of extinction, or his own contribution to the early twentieth century’s massive slaughter of wildlife, but he makes one exception when he describes the extraordinary pains he went to in order to obtain two rhino calves from Nepal. Buck did not personally capture the calves but transported them to New York for Hornaday, who, when he heard that twenty-one adults had been killed in the process, was aghast: I’ll never forget Hornaday’s horror over the fact that these rare and almost extinct patricians of the animal kingdom, these survivors of the great race of Indian rhinos that had practically ceased to exist except in books telling of their mighty feats, should have suffered the ironic fate of being shot down as public nuisances. (Buck & Anthony, 1930: 60) Buck justifies his collecting as a business venture and a service, removing dangerous pests that imperil both plantation laborers and
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