It would be tedious and unnecessary to adduce more instances of wild animals being nurtured in the encampments of savages, either as pets or as sacred animals. It will be found on inquiry that few travellers have failed altogether to observe them. If we consider the small number of encampments they severally visited in their line of march, compared with the vast number that are spread over the whole area, which is or has been inhabited by rude races, we may obtain some idea of the thousands of places at which half-unconscious attempts at domestication are being made in each year. These thousands must themselves be multiplied many thousandfold, if we endeavour to calculate the number of similar attempts that have been made since men like ourselves began to inhabit the world.
My argument, strong as it is, admits of being considerably strengthened by the following consideration:--
The natural inclination of barbarians is often powerfully reinforced by an enormous demand for captured live animals on the part of their more civilised neighbours. A desire to create vast hunting-grounds and menageries and amphitheatrical shows, seems naturally to occur to the monarchs who preside over early civilisations, and travellers continually remark that, whenever there is a market for live animals, savages will supply them in any quantities. The means they employ to catch game for their daily food readily admits of their taking them alive. Pit-falls, stake-nets, and springes do not kill. If the savage captures an animal unhurt, and can make more by selling it alive than dead, he will doubtless do so. He is well fitted by education to keep a wild animal in captivity. His mode of pursuing game requires a more intimate knowledge of the habits of beasts than is ever acquired by sportsmen who use more perfect weapons. A savage is obliged to steal upon his game, and to watch like a jackal for the leavings of large beasts of prey. His own mode of life is akin to that of the creatures he hunts. Consequently, the savage is a good gamekeeper; captured animals thrive in his charge, and he finds it remunerative to take them a long way to market. The demands of ancient Rome appear to have penetrated Northern Africa as far or farther than the steps of our modern explorers. The chief centres of import of wild animals were Egypt, Assyria (and other Eastern monarchies), Rome, Mexico, and Peru. I have not yet been able to learn what were the habits of Hindostan or China. The modern menagerie of Lucknow is the only considerable native effort in those parts with which I am acquainted.
[Egypt.]--The mutilated statistical tablet of Karnak (Trans. R. Soc. Lit., 1847, p. 369, and 1863, p. 65) refers to an armed invasion of Armenia by Thothmes III., and the payment of a large tribute of antelopes and birds. When Ptolemy Philadelphus feted the Alexandrians (Athenoeus, v.), the Ethiopians brought dogs, buffaloes, bears, leopards, lynxes, a giraffe, and a rhinoceros. Doubtless this description of gifts was common. Live beasts are the one article of curiosity and amusement that barbarians can offer to civilised nations.
[Assyria.]--Mr. Fox Talbot thus translates (Journal Asiatic Soc., xix. 124) part of the inscription on the black obelisk of Ashurakbal found in Nineveh and now in the British Museum:--
"He caught in hunter's toils (a blank number) of armi, turakhi, nali, and yadi. Every one of these animals he placed in separate enclosures. He brought up their young ones and counted them as carefully as young lambs. As to the creatures called burkish, utrati (dromedaries?), tishani, and dagari, he wrote for them and they came. The dromedaries he kept in enclosures, where he brought up their young ones. He entrusted each kind of animal to men of their own country to tend them. There were also curious animals of the Mediterranean Sea, which the King of Egypt sent as a gift and entrusted to the care of men of their own land. The very choicest animals were there in abundance, and birds of heaven with beautiful wings. It was a splendid menagerie, and all the work of his own hands. The names of the animals were placed beside them."
[Rome.]--The extravagant demands for the amphitheatre of ancient Rome must have stimulated the capture of wild animals in Asia, Africa, and the then wild parts of Europe, to an extraordinary extent. I will quote one instance from Gibbon:--
"By the order of Probus, a vast quantity of large trees torn up by the roots were transplanted into the midst of the circus. The spacious and shady forest was immediately filled with a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand fallow-deer, and a thousand wild boars, and all this variety of game was abandoned to the riotous impetuosity of the multitude. The tragedy of the succeeding day consisted in the massacre of a hundred lions, an equal number of lionesses, two hundred leopards, and three hundred bears."
Farther on we read of a spectacle by the younger Gordian of "twenty zebras, ten elks, ten giraffes, thirty African hyenas, ten Indian tigers, a rhinoceros, an hippopotamus, and thirty-two elephants."
[Mexico.]--Gomara, the friend and executor of Herman Cortes, states: --