Excerpt from Portraits at the Zoo The Cheetah, or hunting leopard, is the most interesting of all the cat tribe. It is found in Arabia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and in West and Southern India; also in Abyssinia, Senegal, and South Africa. The reason that the Cheetah is called the hunting leopard is because 800 years before the Christian Era it was used in the hunting field in India, exactly as it is still used there in the present day. In the British Museum, in some of the Assyrian carvings, you will see a, Cheetah catching and killing an antelope. There is another carved stone in the Louvre, in Paris, which also shows that the Cheetah must have been known to the Greeks and Romans. In the East, the hunting qualities of this wild animal were very soon discovered, and the natives trained it carefully to catch antelopes, gazelles, nilgai, deer, and other wild animals. It was found, however, that the Cheetahs must be caught full grown and wild, in order to train them to make good hunters; all efforts to train Cheetah cubs proved useless. This was supposed to be because they had not seen their parents capture and kill their prey. But in Africa the Cheetah is only valued for its skin. The great tribal chiefs, African Kings, and other grand personages, dress themselves up in these skins, and consider themselves very fine indeed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.