S.

HOW THEY ARE TRANSPORTED AND TRAINED.

BY RAYMOND BLATHWAYT.

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 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