Doug Faith, you may have company on your Hippo hunt

most everything. There are a few things they normally don't eat. One is monkeys, another is dog type critters including Jackals, Hyenas and other animals that eat dead rotten stuff. Another normally not eaten animal is the Zebra. Underneath the Zebra's hide is a thick yellow layer that is very bitter and not edible to a normal person. Some have tried but ended up throwing it away. Even dogs won't normally eat it.

In Africa the villagers look forward to hunters coming into the area. If no hunters hunt there they get no meat. They don't hunt themselves. I have videos that I normally send out to the folks going to Africa for the first time with me that shows village woman going thru gut piles and picking out one for dinner.

On one of our hunts in a brand new area that hadn't been hunted in over 60 years the game dept. asked us to cull out 60 Impala and 60 Blesbok. They wanted us to shoot old barren cows, cripples, one horned animals and such. All shots had to be head shots so as not to destroy any meat. As we brought the animals into a meat processing station 10 or so at a time, the people in charge would hang them up, gut them, put the gut piles, all in one piece, onto a flat bed wagon. The village women had been there from before daylight with their baskets. They waited patiently and when the wagon bed was full, the women were motioned forward. They would pick up a gut pile, look it over, just like your wife picks out fresh vegetables, and put the gut pile in their basket and walk off. They live in round huts and they cook the gut piles on a piece of steel mesh over an open fire. This is the full gut piles, grass in the stomach and all. When it is cooked to a blackened finish the men cut off little pieces of meat and eat it. The woman are next and then the kids. But nothing is wasted.

This goes for most animals over there. On one of our hunts the game department came to camp and asked us to shoot 3 young elephant that had escaped from Kruger park and were destroying village huts and crops. Now these were young elephant but still maybe 5 or 6 tons. The Game dept. gave us a break on the price at $18,000. We weren't allowed to keep the tusks or hide or anything, just the hunt itself. Now $18,000 was a bit out of my pocket change so I passed but let 2 of the guys use my 510 GNR revolver and they each took one of the 3 elephant. The gist of this is when the elephant was down, one of the trackers got on a walkie talkie and let people know we had 10,000 lbs of fresh meat on the ground. We left to go after the second animal, and got it the next day. When we went back past where the first elephant was, there was nothing but a greasy spot and the upper leg bones of the elephant left. Everything was used. Even most of the bones were used to carve little trinkets that they sell at roadside stands. So in Africa nothing is wasted that is in any way edible.