A DEGENERATE HYANA 
developed a taste for the hen-roosts and the last stage 
of the island was worse than the first. It is ever thus 
when we attempt to interfere with the due course of 
Nature. 
THE AARD WOLF 
The aard wolf, Proteles cristatus, is one of the scarcer 
visitors to the Zoo, only two examples altogether having 
been exhibited there. The animal is hyzna-like in 
aspect, and is in fact a kind of weakened and slightly 
degenerate hyena. The huge teeth of the latter which 
can crack a marrow bone as easily as a man will a nut, 
are dwindled into tiny and inefficacious organs of 
mastication. But it is striped like one species of hyena, 
and has a mane like that cowardly and yet ferocious 
carnivore. The aard wolf, or ‘‘earth’’ wolf as the 
phrase is to be translated, is a nocturnal creature that 
lives in deserted or unappropriated dwellings of the aard 
vark or earth pig, the ‘“‘ Edentate’’ Orycteropus. The 
Swede Sparrman, who first gave a proper account of this 
feeble relation of the hyzenas, called it ‘‘ viverra,” and as 
a matter of fact, it has rather more affinities to the 
Viverridz, or civet tribe, than have the hyenas, though 
the latter come nearer to that group of cat-like animals, 
than to the cats proper. The ineffective teeth of the 
hyeena-like Proteles are readily explained when its food 
is taken into account. The stomachs of no less than 
fifty individuals have been examined (it is hoped that the 
creature is now on the “ protected list’), and in all of 
them nothing but termites (white “ ants ’’) were found. 
At the Zoo, a mixture of finely chopped meat and milk 
and bread does duty, or rather did duty, in the case of 
this animal and the ant-eaters, for the real article of diet. 
It would seem, however, that Proteles has copied the 
objectionable habit of the chacma baboon (see page 32), 
and has taken to killing lambs for the sake of the curdled 
106 
