NA ELK, (_Cervus merriami_).--Right at our very door, under our
very noses and as it were only yesterday, a well-defined species of
American elk has been totally exterminated. Until recently the mountains
of Arizona and New Mexico were inhabited by a light-colored elk of
smaller size than the Wyoming species, whose antlers possessed on each
side only one brow tine instead of two. The exact history of the
blotting out of that species has not yet been written, but it seems that
its final extinction occurred about 1901. Its extermination was only a
routine incident of the devilish general slaughter of American big game
that by 1900 had wiped out nearly everything killable over a large
portion of the Rocky Mountain region and the Great Plains.

The Arizona elk was exterminated before the separate standing of the
species had been discovered by naturalists, and before even _one_ skin
had been preserved in a museum! In 1902 Mr. E.W. Nelson described the
species from two male skulls, all the material of which he knew. Since
that time, a third male skull, bearing an excellent pair of antlers, has
been discovered by Mr. Ferdinand Kaegebehn, a member of the New York
Zoological Society, and presented to our National Collection of Heads
and Horns. It came from the Santa Catalina Mountains, Arizona, in 1884.
The species was first exterminated in the central and northern mountains
of Arizona, probably twenty years ago, and made its last stand in
northwestern New Mexico. Precisely when it became extinct there, its
last abiding place, we do not know, but in time the facts may appear.

THE QUAGGA, (_Equus quagga_).--Before the days of Livingstone,
Gordon-Cumming and Anderson, the grassy plains and half-forested hills
of South Africa were inhabited by great herds of a wild equine species
that in its markings was a sort of connecting link between the striped
zebras and the stripeless wild asses. The quagga resembled a wild ass
with a few zebra stripes around its neck, and no stripes elsewhere.

There is no good reason why a mammal that is not in any one of the
families regularly eaten by man should be classed as a game animal.
White men, outside of the western border of the continent of Europe, do
not eat horses; and by this token there is no reason why a zebra should
be shot as a "game" animal, any more than a baboon. A big male baboon is
dangerous; a male zebra is not.

Nevertheless, white men have elected to shoot zebras as game; and