INTRODUCTION vii 
to strange food is made under the worst conditions, on board 
ship or in the dealer’s shop, or in the unfamiliar surroundings 
of anew home. A golden rule in the purchase of animals 
with which one is not fully acquainted, is to refuse them 
unless they feed readily on a kind of food which the pur- 
chaser can supply in future. Such a condition may be ful- 
filled most easily when the animals, immediately after they 
are caught, are accustomed gradually to a new diet and to 
take their food from human beings. In the vast majority of 
cases it is change of food and not change of climate that is 
the difficulty in what is called acclimatisation. Walruses 
are brought to a European city with an appetite for nothing 
but whales’ blubber, or monkeys who refuse everything ex- 
cept fresh sugar-cane, and the usual tragedies result. 
Carl Hagenbeck’s business is conducted on very differ- 
ent lines, and the animals he imports and distributes have 
been treated so as to have the best chance of surviving. 
He has been a notable pioneer in the proper handling of 
wild animals. He is an able man, and sees that the 
crude methods do not pay; he is a naturalist with a 
genuine affection and sympathy for animals, and in all his 
handling of them he sees to it that their health and general 
condition is the first care. In the many expeditions he has 
organised to Africa and Asia for the capture of wild animals, 
the highest qualities of a naturalist have been necessary. It 
is the fashion to claim that the big game sportsman and col- 
lector of trophies must be a naturalist of a high order ; I have 
heard defenders of these forms of sport speak as if the poet 
Coleridge had written :— 
He killeth best who loveth best, 
All things both great and small. 
There was perhaps the beginning of a defence for such a 
