All the wild animals are subject to intestinal worms besides.  I have observed bunches of a tape-like thread and short worms of enlarged sizes in the rhinoceros.  The zebra and elephants are seldom without them, and a thread-worm may often be seen under the peritoneum of these animals.  Short red larvae, which convey a stinging sensation to the hand, are seen clustering round the orifice of the windpipe (trachea) of this animal at the back of the throat; others are seen in the frontal sinus of antelopes; and curious flat, leech-like worms, with black eyes, are found in the stomachs of leches.  The zebra, giraffe, eland, and kukama have been seen mere skeletons from decay of their teeth as well as from disease.

The carnivora, too, become diseased and mangy; lions become lean and perish miserably by reason of the decay of the teeth.  When a lion becomes too old to catch game, he frequently takes to killing goats in the villages; a woman or child happening to go out at night falls a prey too; and as this is his only source of subsistence now, he continues it.  From this circumstance has arisen the idea that the lion, when he has once tasted human flesh, loves it better than any other.  A man-eater is invariably an old lion; and when he overcomes his fear of man so far as to come to villages for goats, the people remark, “His teeth are worn, he will soon kill men.”  They at once acknowledge the necessity of instant action, and turn out to kill him.  When living far away from population, or when, as is the case in some parts, he entertains a wholesome dread of the Bushmen and Bakalahari, as soon as either disease or old age overtakes him, he begins to catch mice and other small rodents, and even to eat grass; the natives, observing undigested vegetable matter in his droppings, follow up his trail in the certainty of finding him scarcely able to move under some tree, and dispatch him without difficulty.  The grass may have been eaten as medicine, as is observed in dogs.

That the fear of man often remains excessively strong in the carnivora is proved from well-authenticated cases in which the lioness, in the vicinity of towns where the large game had been unexpectedly driven away by fire-arms, has been known to assuage the paroxysms of hunger by devouring her own young.  It must be added, that, though the effluvium which is left by the footsteps of man is in general sufficient to induce lions to avoid a village, there are exceptions; so many came about our half-deserted houses at Chonuane while we were in the act of removing to Kolobeng, that the natives who remained with Mrs. Livingstone were terrified to stir out of doors in the evenings.  Bitches, also, have been known to be guilty of the horridly unnatural act of eating their own young, probably from the great desire for animal food, which is experienced by the inhabitants as well.