I recently went to Rome and took a tour of the coliseum. Our tour guide mentioned that hunts of exotic beasts (lions, bears, ostriches, leopard etc.) were extremely popular events. Obviously prisoners being executed by being forced to fight lions is a pretty popular image of Rome, but how were these animals obtained? Was there an industry of hunters who would go to the edges of the empire and capture bears and lions? Did the industry exist all the time or were hunters only dispatched in preparation for large events? Based on the popularity of these events many animals were surely killed, did it have an effect on the population of these animals? Also a lot has been written about the lives of gladiators and charioteers but what were the lives of hunters like who had to fight animals in the coliseum for a living?
I know we think lions as exotic but we have to remember that the Roman Empire stretched from North Africa to Middle East and there were a lot of spaces that are now extinct in these areas. For example the Barbary Lion in North Africa, the Arabian Leopard and they probably used the Asiatic lion which ranged from Turkey to Persia.