EDISON AT THE PRESENT DAY.
WILD BEASTS.
HOW THEY ARE TRANSPORTED AND TRAINED.
Few of those people who go to a menagerie realize what an immense undertaking it is to transport wild beasts from the land of their birth and of their freedom to the land of their imprisonment, and, too frequently, of their death. I will ask my readers to picture for themselves an African desert blazing beneath a burning sun. Across the weary waste of sand a long column of men and animals is wending its slow way. As it draws nearer we see that it is a caravan of wild animals on their way from the interior to the seaboard. And as it passes us, the vast mass of living creatures, as in a chemical process, slowly dissolves itself into distinct particles and individualities. Let us regard them carefully. In the first place we notice a procession of fourteen stately giraffes, then come five elephants, a huge rhinoceros, four wild buffaloes bellowing sadly after the mates they have forever left behind. Then there go lumbering by a number of enormous carts or wagons, in which are safely confined thirty hyenas, five leopards, six lions, two chetahs, sixteen antelopes, two lynxes, one serval, one wardbob, twenty smaller carnivorous animals, four African ant-eaters, and forty-five monkeys. And then there come slowly prancing by, wary, restless, cunning, twenty-six ostriches. There are twenty boxes of birds, from which sounds of shrill screaming are constantly proceeding. There are upwards of a hundred Abyssinian goats scattered here and there in the procession. These are to give milk for the young animals, and to serve as food and meat for the old. The caravan is on its way through the desert to Suakim, which is the first shipping place for Europe. There are no less than a hundred and twenty 127 camels in it, which are required to carry the food for this caravan, and there are upwards of a hundred and sixty drivers in the procession. It takes the caravans upwards of thirty-six days to cover the distance which lies between Cassala in the interior of Nubia and the port of Suakim, for which they are bound. The same journey is usually performed by quick post camels in twelve days.
This is the exact account of a caravan which Karl Hagenbeck told me he brought across the desert in the year 1870. “It is tremendously anxious work,” said he, “the transportation of these animals across sea and land. The amount of water which we have to carry with us in goats’ hides upon camels’ backs is prodigious, for nothing would be more awful than to run short of water in the middle of the desert, and to be surrounded by a number of wild beasts, maddened with heat and unquenchable thirst. The principal food for the young elephants and rhinoceroses on the way home is a fruit called nabeck, that is, a kind of cherry of which they are very fond. Giraffes and antelopes and ostriches are provided with the doura corn that grows in the interior. All these bigger animals walk, and as they jog along my people feed them occasionally with hard ship biscuit, which appears to sustain them well through the journey. At four o’clock every morning the caravan strikes its tents and begins its march. They go plodding along till ten o’clock, when the day becomes too hot for further progress.”