Excepting for the single fact of having interior and exterior cages, the Lion House of the Zoological Park is—like the Primate House—an entirely original development. Its most important new features are as follows:
All cage service, the introducing and withdrawal of animals, is conducted from the rear, by means of a track underneath the sleeping dens, and an elevating platform car.
The communication between indoor and outdoor cages is direct and continuous.
Instead of upright iron bars, all the cage fronts are of hard-steel wire netting, in rectangular pattern, attached to wrought iron frames. This is considered by the Zoological Society a great improvement upon the heavy bar-work hitherto in universal use for cage fronts in lion houses.
CHEETAH.
The space above the sleeping dens has been developed as a sunlit balcony, whereon the animals will be very conspicuous, even to large crowds of visitors.
Jungle-green tiling, impervious to moisture and dirt, is used as a back-ground for the animals.
The Lion is an animal of perpetual interest, but like every other noteworthy wild animal, its haunts are constantly being claimed by civilization, and its members are rapidly decreasing. It is not a difficult matter to exterminate or drive out from a given territory any large and conspicuous quadruped, and at the present rate of settlement and industrial development in Africa, it may easily come to pass that by the end of the present century, the king of beasts will be without a home, outside of zoological collections.
Like everything great, the Lion has his share of critics and detractors. A few writers have asserted that because he does not stalk through his native forests with head proudly erect, like a drum-major on parade, he is mean-spirited and cowardly. But the beast of noble countenance believes in the survival of the fittest, and both by inheritance and observation he knows that a lion who needlessly exposes himself in the field captures the smallest amount of game, and attracts the greatest number of steel-tipped bullets.