34 My Garden Summer-Seat. 



eating young lambs ; in the commencement they killed 

 the lambs for the sake of the milk in their stomachs, 

 but they appear now to have acquired a taste for meat, 

 and devour the flesh of their victims." * 



A more extraordinary case still is that of the New 

 Zealand lory or kea, which from a strict vegetarian has 

 become a voracious flesh-eater, and this entirely since 

 the colonists appeared in New Zealand. Prior to this 

 the kea, like the cuckatoos and macaws, was a mild- 

 mannered, fruit-eating, or honey-sucking bird. But 

 " as soon as sheep-stations were established in the 

 island, these degenerate parrots began to acquire a 

 distinct taste for raw mutton. At first, to be sure, 

 they ate only the sheeps' heads and offal that were 

 thrown out from the slaughter-houses, picking the 

 bones as clean of meat as a dog or a jackal. But in 

 process of time, as the taste for blood grew upon them, 

 a still viler idea entered into their wicked heads. The 

 first step on the downward path suggested the second. 

 If dead sheep are good to eat, why not also living ones ? 

 The kea, pondering deeply on this abstruse problem, 

 solved it at once with an emphatic affirmative. And 

 he straightway proceeded to act upon his convictions, 

 and invent a really hideous mode of procedure. Perch- 

 ing on the backs of the living sheep, he has now learnt 

 the exact spot where the kidneys are to be found; and 

 he tears open the flesh to get at these dainty morsels, 

 which he pulls out and devours, leaving the unhappy 

 animal to die in miserable agony. As many as two 

 hundred ewes have thus been killed in a night at a 

 single station. I need hardly add that the sheep- 

 farmer naturally resents this irregular proceeding, so 

 opposed to all ideals of good grazing, and that the days 

 * A. W. Buckland's "Anthropology," p. 42. 



