Tame cheetah and an attack

Last week a report appeared on my basic news home page (BBCnews) about an attack on a British woman named Violet D’Mello. She had been mauled by a cheetah and some difficult-to-watch video footage was also out there. The story was picked up by many media outlets all over the world. It’s gory and so on, but it does have a happyish ending. Despite nasty injuries to her head, particularly to her eyes, Mrs. D’Mello survived and by now will be well on the way to recovery from the physical injuries.

I’m not here to recap the unfortunate story, but I am interested in the whole business of keeping wild animals as “pets.” It is something I have real problems with, for a variety of reasons.

Cheetahs have been “domesticated” for at least three thousand years. Tame cheetahs were used as hunting animals during the seventeenth and eighteenth Dynasty (1550-1292 BC) in Egypt.  The best-known examples date from the time of the Moghul (or Mughal) emperors in India during the 16^th and 17^th centuries AD. They had large numbers of these beautiful cats that they used for hunting, especially of the Indian blackbuck.

This picture, in the public domain, was painted by the famous Englishman, George Stubbs, best known for this many depictionsof horses. 

 

EmperorAkbar Hunting with Cheetahs – 

Akbar the Great (1556 to 1605) was reputed to have about a thousand cheetahs tamed in this way, although it is not clear if they were all owned at one time.  Adult cheetahs, that had already learned hunting skills from their mothers, were preferred to cubs, which took a lot longer to train. The cheetahs were blindfolded and “carted.” When potential quarry was seen the blindfold was removed and the hunt was on. It all sounds very much like a falconry exercise. This picture of Akbar, which I got from an intersting site on the web here

dates from the 16th century and shows him with a large retinue in attendance.The cheetahs are hunting gazelles and blackbuck.

 

During my intern year I used to see a tame cheetah at the small animal clinic at the vet school Kenya. It was really tame and would purr away as one examined it.  I’ve told the full story in my book Wrestling With Rhinos (http://www.jerryhaigh.com/book/). 

Joy Adamson and Pippa, photo taken by Andrew Botta

 I also had to deal with a tame cheetah named Pippa that conservationist Joy Adamson “owned” and claimed to be returning to the wild. That is open to question, as she did not want to lose contact with it (something she wrote in her book The Spotted Sphinx) and continued to feed it an inappropriate diet even when it had shown that it could hunt successfully and had mated with a wild cheetah and was raising a littler. That story is also told in WWR.

There do not appear to be any other accounts of a cheetah attacking a human, so I do wonder if an important element of Mrs. D’Mello’s experience was the presence of children. I have watched, with fascination and concern, as all three of Africa’s big cats have shown an unhealthy interest in small children. I wonder if they simply see them as a bite-sized snack in some sort of atavistic return to the time when humans would have been one source of prey on the open plains. 

My first experience with this phenomenon was in George Adamson’s camp at Mughwango, in Kenya’s Meru National Park. One of the several lionesses came over as we sat and drank a coffee with George. Luckily we were inside his somewhat secure chicken-wire enclosure, part of which you can see here on the left in this paicture taken by colleague and friend Roger Windsor. Two lions are asleep on and beneath the platform in the centre. The big cat simply stared us down, concentrating entirely on the three-year-old daughter of our friends. Her eyes had that scary Yumyum look.   

 

Another of Roger Windsor's photos of George.

It is not widely known that even George’s very tame lions would occasionally maul and in one case kill a human. George was himself attacked on one occasion.

A few years later I was with friends at the Pretoria Zoo in South Africa and their small daughter was sitting on her mother’s shoulders. As we stood by the cheetah pen one of the cats came over, stretched up the wire and took a very close look at the two-year old from about a metre away. It was spooky.

Of Moose and Men - final edits

Of Moose and Men- final edits.

It's the second day of the New Year and a spectacular sunrise to greet us. Also the day that I have completed my final edit of the new book Of Moose and Men. The subtitle has been chosen and appears as A Wildlife Vet’s Pursuit of the World’s Largest Deer. I’ve been working off an “advanced reading copy” which lacks the colour plates and an index, but they will come, along with appropriate quotes and so on. I can share a couple of things. The first is my opening quote, that comes from a speech made by Sit James Barrie at the St. Andrews University convocation in 1922. He said:

“It is not real work unless you would rather be doing something else.”

The second is some of the material about the taming, not quite domestication, of moose through the ages. This comes near the end of the book after I have discussed many of my own experiences with them, and a bunch of other stuff about their lives, their antlers (and the role of these in moose sex) and the carnage they cause on the roads. The first written records of tamed moose in North America come from the early 1600s when French priests reported that there were moose in captivity in New France, but it seems highly likely that Aboriginal people had tamed them long before that because those same priests and later European explorers commented on how easy moose were to train, and many authors and raconteurs mention how remarkably tame a moose can become.

This photo, by Ernest Brown, will be in the book courtesy of the Provincial Archives of Alberta. It is simply titled “Moose in harness.” Unfortunately the photographer provided only a brief caption to the image: “Moose Yoked.” No other information about the location or history of this photo has been found. In 1770 Samuel Hearne, who was the first European to reach the Arctic Ocean by a mainland route across North America, noted that moose “are also the easiest to tame and domesticate of any of the deer kind.” He went further in describing the details. “I have repeatedly seen them at Churchill as tame as sheep, and even more so; for they would follow their keeper any distance from home, and at his call return with him, without the least trouble, or even offering to deviate from the path.” The deviation, or lack of it, is not constant. In 1910 a man named D.E. Lantz, who worked for the U.S. Biological Survey, gave a pithy account of this when he wrote the following about a pair of moose that had been trained to pull a buggy, “which they did with great steadiness and swiftness, subject, however, to the inconvenience that, when they once took it into their heads to cool themselves in a neighbouring river or lake, no effort could prevent them.” Also in 1910, author, explorer, and naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton wrote that that moose were “much more tractable and valuable than reindeer . . . they are docile, easily trained, exceedingly swift, and, being natural trotters, are well suited for light travel.” There are several even earlier accounts of tamed moose, especially ones that were shipped to Europe, to men like England’s King George III and to dukes who could no doubt afford the considerable costs involved. Many of these animals, however, died soon after arrival or even while on board ship. The year 1770 crops up again in this context because the first bull moose to make it alive to England was sent that year by Guy Carleton, Governor General of Canada, to the Second Duke of Richmond, who later imported two more. The duke must have acted quickly after the animal arrived in order to engage an artist, because that first one is the subject of a work, also dated 1770, by one of the great animal painters of all time: George Stubbs, best known for his wonderful pictures of horses.

The photo of this famous painting, which will appear in the colour section of the book, was kindly shared by the folks at the The Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, my alma mater. The animal had only his first set of antlers, and those at bottom left were included to show what a mature set would look like. © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2011 There are fewer records or claims of moose being used as saddle animals and some of these may be more fancy than fact. Among others these accounts include descriptions of attempts to use moose for postal delivery and as cavalry mounts in Sweden. An urban myth has it that either King Karl XI of Sweden, or his successor Karl XII, even went so far as to invade Russia with moose-mounted hussars in the late 17th or very early 18th century. This story seemed to be too good to be true and the dangers of the Internet soon showed themselves as some entries appeared to confirm it, while others made no mention. I did some digging and received this email from my colleague and friend Dr. Bengt Roken.

There is no documentation to be found in the historic literature about moose used by the ancient military. Not even their use for postal deliveries is true. During the 19th century a number of moose calves were reared and got tame and some of them could pull a sledge or carry a rider. One farmer, Darelli, published his experiences with a pair of hand-reared moose and speculated about the possible use of trained moose as superior to horses in the cavalry. From his speculations most of the tales about moose cavalries have evolved.

Hope these tidbits tickle your fancy.