154 



CASSELL'S POPULAR NATURAL HISTORY. 



Immlin" the streets ,-f rObf* ;ud towns, where they devour the offal, not refusing the hardest bones, 

 which they .rush int.. small fra-^nents with their powerful jaws. In this work of clearing the street* 

 they are j',.ine,l by the vulture, between whom and themselves a friendly alliance appears to exist. 

 The bytaa -I.K-S n..t, however, c6nfine his visits to towns and villages, nor his food to the offal there. 

 He also minis round the country, in packs, in search of living prey. The ass is his favourite food ; but 

 cattle of all descriptions are ravenously destroyed. 



Major Denhara says: "The hyaenas are everywhere in legions, and grow now so extremely 

 ravenous, that a good large village, where I sometimes procured a draught of sour milk on my duck- 

 Bhooting excursions, had been attacked the night before my last visit, the town absolutely carried by 

 Htorm, notwithstanding defences of nearly six feet high of branches of the prickly triUoh, and two 

 donkeys whose flesh these animals are particularly fond of carried off, in spite of the efforts of the 

 people. We constantly heard thorn close to the walls of our town at night, and, on a gate being partly 

 left open, they would enter and carry off any unfortunate animal they could find in the streets." 



Of another place, the same traveller says : "The hyaenas came so close to the tents last night, that 

 a camel, which lay about a hundred yards from the inclosure, was found nearly half eaten. A lion first 

 made a meal on the poor animal, when the hyaenas came down upon what he had left." 



Bruce says : " The hytenas were the scourge of Abyssinia, in every situation, both of the city and 

 the field ; and they seemed to surpass even the sheep in number. From evening till the dawn of day 

 the town of Gondar was full of them : here they sought the different pieces of slaughtered carcases 

 which were exposed in the streets without burial. 



" Many a time in the night, when the king had kept me late in the palace, on going across the 

 square from the king's house, I have been apprehensive lest they should bite me in the leg. They 

 grunted in great numbers around me, although I was surrounded with several armed men, who seldom 

 passed a night without wounding or slaughtering some of them. One night, I went out of my tent, 

 and, returning immediately, I saw two large blue eyes glaring at me in the dark. I called my servant 

 to bring a light, and we found a hyaena standing near the head of the bed with two or three large 

 bunches of candles in his mouth ; by keeping which he seemed, at that time, to wish for no other prey. 

 I was not afraid of him, and, with'a pike, struck him as near the heart as I could. It was not till 1 

 hail done this that he showed any signs of fierceness ; but, upon feeling his wound, he dropped the 

 candles, and endeavoured to run upon the shaft of the spear to arrive at me ; so that I was obliged to 

 draw a pistol from my girdle and shoot him ; and nearly at the same time my servant cleft his skull 

 with a battle-axe. In a word, the hyaenas were the plague of our lives, the terror of our night-walks, 

 and the destruction of our mules and asses, which are their favourite food." 



It is recorded that an old hyaena, kept in the Jardin des Plantes, at Paris, had its leg broken, 

 when, one night, it bit off the leg at the broken part and ate it. Similar facts are stated as to other 

 animals. Thus, in Wombwell's menagerie, a leopard had got its hind legs lacerated by another leopard 

 in a neighbouring cage. On the following night, after being properly secured in its cell, the leopard 

 actually gnawed off its two hind feet to the extent of several inches up the ankle, and crushed and ate 

 its own flesh and bones. 



Dr. Buckland remarks, on visiting Wombwell's collection : " I was enabled to observe the 

 hyaena's mode in proceeding with the destruction of bones. The shin-bone of an ox being presented 

 to this animal, he began to bite off with his molar teeth large fragments from its upper extremity, and 

 swallowed them whole as fast as they were broken off. On his reaching the medullary cavity, the bone 

 split into angular fragments, many of which he caught up greedily and swallowed entire. He went on 

 cracking till he had extracted all the marrow, licking out the lowest portion of it with his tongue ; this 

 dune, lie left untouched the lower condyle, which contains no marrow, and is very hard. 



" I gave the animal successively three shin-bones of a sheep ; he snapped them asunder in a 

 moment, dividing each into two parts only, which he swallowed entire, without the smallest mastication. 

 ( hi the keeper potting a spar of wood, two inches in diameter, into his den, he cracked it in pieces as 

 if it had IM-CII touchwood, and in a minute the whole was reduced to a mass of splinters. The power 

 of Ins jaws far . \eeeded any animal force of the kind I ever saw exerted, and reminded me of nothing 

 nnii-h as a miner's crushing-mill, or the scissors with which they cut off bars of iron and copper in 

 t lie metal fnundrii 



