Читать книгу Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent's Park Gardens онлайн

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Tameness is by no means confined to the northern species of tiger. “Jack,” an Indian tiger, which died in the same year as “Warsaw,” was quite as friendly to its keepers, and surpassed him in beauty. For some time it shared with the Sokoto lion the place of honour as the finest creature in the Gardens. When it arrived, in 1888, as a five-months-old cub, it was led by a chain and collar like a big dog, and was for some time taken to and from its cage by the keepers with no other precaution, until its reluctance to be shut up when it preferred to walk at large, and the difficulty of “coercing” so large an animal, led to its permanent incarceration. “Jack” was the tiger which, in the experiments with different musical instruments subsequently described, displayed so marked an objection to the sounds of the piccolo.

In spite of the deaths of the three tigers, of “Duke,” the old lion, and of a jaguar and puma, the years 1892-1894 have seen an increase in the numbers of the inmates of the Lion House greater than at any period since the return of the Prince of Wales from his Indian visit, and the collection of so many fine young animals gives a good idea of the difference in “points” and form in creatures of the same species. There is as much difference in lions as in horses or in dogs of the same breed, and they are by no means uniformly noble or impressive to look upon. Some are “down at heel,” some narrow-chested, others have Roman noses, a very ugly feature in a lion; some, on the other hand, are all that a lion should be.