My dear chap,he was an ivory hunter, he was shooting them for their tusks, and the ivory was auctioned back in England. He was doing it for the money.

He made 863 pounds in one day once. This was at a time when the average working man would make 70 pounds a year.

WDM Bell sighted his elephant rifles in for 80 yards, and was commonly shooting them on foot at ranges of twenty to seventy yards. Other times he was shooting them over tall grasses by standing on his telescope tripod.
But he shot in many different countries and terrains over many years.
The range he most mentions is about brain shots shooting at around forty yards.
He said that all of his elephant hunting was done with offhand shots, with no support.

I have heard before, about how he shot all his elephants at long range, or something - or even that he used to shoot his elephant when they were asleep by climbing up a ladder and shooting them in the ear!
It is simply not true, if you read his books and articles. I have JA Hunters books, and also WDM Bells, and Hunter often seems to get stories a little bit cockeyed, like he read or heard about Bell several years ago and is telling it again from memory...

(As for shooting them in the forest and not doing well at it, that story was about shooting in Liberia and because the elephant were much smaller forest variety, Bell was very disppointed in the size of the tusks, not because he was unable to get close to them in the bush.
He was lucky to escape with his life not because an elephant nearly got him, but because his African people got lost, and he had trouble finding his way out.)

The total - according to his own records - was exactly 1,011 elephants, of which 28 were cows which were shot because they were being aggresive and were bothering his people.
Bell even itemised elephants shot by region, the most he shot in one area was the Lado enclave, which was 268 bulls. (On the other hand the average ivory wieght was lower in the Lado Enclave than elsewhere.)

He wrote that he shot around 800 with the .275. The rest was with the .303, 6.5x57,a handful with the 450/400, .350 Rigby Magnum and one that people always gloss over, the .318 Westley Richards.
In his last trips it is apparent that he had swapped over to using the .318 WR as a preference.


He gave it up because he was in his forties, and because Africa was closing up, there were fewer places you could shoot freely the way he had done before WW1; he had acheievd his stated aim of a 1000 elephants, and he had money.
Unsaid, but probably just as likely, was that he had got married and after two safaris after the war, the wife probably got in his ear about being away in Africa for most of a year at a time...you can imagine.

This is a typical bell elephant shooting, drawn by himself:

[Linked Image]

"A person that carries a cat home by the tail will receive information that will always be useful to him." Mark Twain