One of the most unexpected and fascinating passages in Xenophon's Anabasis is the one describing the Greek mercenaries' encounter with the wildlife of Mesopotamia as they marched down the east bank of the Euphrates in the summer of 401 BC (1.5.2-5):

Trees there were none, but wild animals of all sorts, vast numbers of wild asses and many ostriches, besides bustards and gazelles. These animals were sometimes chased by the horsemen. As for the asses, whenever one chased them, they would run on ahead and stop—for they ran much faster than the horses—and then, when the horses came near, they would do the same thing again, and it was impossible to catch them unless the horsemen posted themselves at intervals and hunted them in relays. The flesh of those that were captured was like venison, but more tender. But no ostrich was captured by anyone, and any horseman who chased one soon gave up; for it would outpace him at once in its flight, not merely plying its feet, but hoisting its wings and using them like a sail. The bustards, on the other hand, can be caught if one is quick in starting them up, for they fly only a short distance, like partridges, and soon tire. Their flesh was delicious.

I was once bitten (very slightly—near the knee) by a bear—at Roger Williams Park in Providence.

—H. P. Lovecraft to Duane Rimel, 4 Aug 1935, Letters to F. Lee Baldwin, &c 282

There's a joke in Lovecraft circles that if there are three days in his life without a letter, we refer to it as his "lost period"—a bit of an exaggeration, but few people from his lifetime are so well-documented. Yet there is this incident, mentioned only once in his surviving letters, and we don't have any more information about it. There is a zoo at Roger Williams Park and they did have a bear enclosure—how that led to Lovecraft getting bitten, or when, no one has any idea.

The word "buccaneer" is often used today as a synonym for pirates and privateers and indeed its use in this way goes back almost to its origins, but originally it came from the practice of smoking cattle or pig meat over a fire and then drying and salting it to create something like jerky or bacon. The word boucon originally derives from a native Caribbean word referring to both the wooden frames used to smoke meat and the campsite at which the hunters smoked meat, and it was borrowed in the 1620s by French backwoodsmen and hunters in the Caribbean who came to be called boucaniers.

These French backwoodsmen arrived in Tortuga (an island just north of Hispaniola or modern Haiti) in the mid-1620s where they survived by hunting wild pigs and cattle introduced there by the Spanish and then selling the preserved meat and hides to passing Dutch and English ships. The Spanish at this time considered all of the Caribbean to be their domain and tried numerous times to drive the French out of their stronghold on Tortuga, but each time the backwoodsmen or boucaniers merely fled back into the wilderness of Hispaniola where the Spanish couldn't follow them, and each time the Spanish eventually abandoned Tortuga as they weren't able to sustain a settlement there on their own. Soon the French boucaniers in Tortuga began striking back at the Spanish by attacking their ships using dugout canoes and eventually larger ships they captured. It was in this way that boucanier became a byword for pirate or privateer and was later anglisized to buccaneer. By the mid-17th century, the French in Tortuga were joined by many English and Dutch interlopers who joined in their attacks on the Spanish and began calling themselves buccaneers. They had became so numerous and powerful that by the late 17th century buccaneers were able to sack and plunder some of the largest Spanish settlements in the Caribbean. Yet despite this hugely successful new employment that far overshadowed the etymological origin of buccaneers, the old practice of hunting wild pigs and cattle and selling the meat and hides did continue.

The French buccaneer Alexandre Exquemlin published a very important book in 1678 called The Buccaneers of America translated into English. In this book, Exquemlin gives an account of how he became an indentured servant in 1666 and was later sold by the French West India Company to buccaneers in Tortuga and Hispaniola. Some of the buccaneers who Exquemelin was sold to brought him along to help them hunt wild pigs and cattle, and Exquemlin goes into great detail about how these hunts were conducted as well as describing countless other animals and plants he encountered there in meticulous detail, proving himself to be a keen and interested observer. In addition to wild pigs and cattle in Hispaniola that had been introduced by the Spanish, there were also wild horses and many packs of wild dogs that often hunted the pigs. The buccaneers would capture some of these dogs as puppies and then use them as hunting dogs. Strangely the buccaneers would sometimes even capture baby piglets and train these to track wild pigs for them like the dogs:

These wild pigs can be tamed, as I know from experience. We have caught piglets in the forest, and brought them up on meat. When they were grown up, they used to follow us like dogs. They would run ahead of us into the trees, and when they met with any wild swine, they would start grunting and squeeling, and the hounds rushed up directly. When the wild boar had been killed, the tame pigs would eat the raw flesh like the hounds, and then they would follow us again. (Exquemelin, 50)

However, one of the most interesting things that Exquemelin describes about the hunting of wild pigs and cattle on Hispaniola, whether by people or packs of wild dogs, is that this concentrated hunting over many decades resulted in very damaging effects to the population:

There used to be huge numbers of wild bulls and cows, but nowadays they are beginning to become scarce, being rapaciously preyed on from every side. The Spaniards destroy as many as they can, to grieve the French; the wild dogs devour many of their calves; and the French hunters in their turn slaughter them in great quantity. ... It is a wonder there still remains a single bull or wild boar on Hispaniola. For the past eighty-one years [his dating is actually off by about 30 years, so it was really more like 50 years], more than 1,500 wild swine have been destroyed every day, both by the Spaniards and the French. Indeed, from my own experience, I would say the French slaughter more than this every day, yet despite all this destruction there is still an incredible quantity of wild pigs on the island. (Exquemlin, 49-50)

A slightly later English buccaneer named William Dampier (another keen observer of nature who was one of the first to to describe Galapagos tortoises in the 1680s which later influenced Charles Darwin) wrote of his own experiences hunting wild cattle in Central America during the late 1670s, and likewise smoking/salting the meat and preserving the hides. He also discusses how this over-hunting was beginning to damage the population there, and had already done so on the English Caribbean island of Jamaica where wild cattle were nearly wiped out in the mid-17th century before being reintroduced:

The Spaniards pick and chuse only the Bulls and old Cows, and leave the young Cattle to breed; by which means they alwas preserve their Stock entire. On the contrary, the English and French kill without distinction; yea, the young rather than the old; without regard of keeping up their Stock. Jamaica is a remarkable Instance of this our Folly, in this Particular. For when it was first taken by the English [1655], the Savannahs were well stockt with Cattle; but were soon all destroy'd by our Souldiers, who suffered great Hardships afterwards for it: and it was never stock'd again till Sir Thomas Linch was Governor [early 1670s]. He sent to Cuba for a supply of Cattle, which are now grown very plentiful, because every Man knows his own proper Goods. Whereas before, when there was no Property, each Man destroyed as fast as he could. (Dampier, 98)

I think the above is a very interesting observation and illustrates the economic concept of tragedy of the commons. After the English first invaded Jamaica in 1655 and took it from the Spanish, all the land was at first owned by the governor and allowed for public use. So in the same way that free food samples might be quickly devoured by the public, everyone hunted the wild cattle as recklessly as possible, simply trying to kill as many as they could before the next person did. But after private property ownership was established in the following decades and cattle were reintroduced, the people hunting wild cattle on their own land had much more insentive to hunt responsibly since they didn't have to fear others out competing them. In the same way, when the French first arrived in Tortuga and Hispaniola in the 1620s where they lived in constant conflict with the Spanish, they also had little incentive to preserve the wild cattle and pigs, as indeed the Spanish themselves deliberately over-hunted them in Hispaniola in an attempt to starve the buccaneers out as Exquemlin describes. In the same way, William Dampier and his comrades in Central America during the late 1670s (which the Spanish also claimed to own) also had little insentive to preserve the wild cattle and pigs there.

Sources:

The Buccaneers of America by Alexandre Exquemelin, 1678

A Supplament of the Voyage Round the World by William Dampier, 1705

From the ninth to the twelfth centuries, the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated almost every type of animal. In 1225, eels were booted out of the church. In 1386, at Falaise, France, a sow was expelled, and in 1389, at Dijon, a horse was ostracized. An ox was banished in 1405. Rats and bloodsuckers were ousted at Bern, Switzerland, in 1451. In Delemont, in 1906, a Swiss dog was one of the last animals to be excommunicated.

Source

Stephens, John Richard. “Ignorance and Intelligence.” Weird History 101: Tales of Intrigue, Mayhem, and Outrageous Behavior. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006. 118. Print.

Cross-posted from /r/HistoryAnecdotes (https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryAnecdotes/comments/825gj6/the_catholic_church_has_a_long_proud_history_of/)

The Royal Navy ventured all over the world, with bases from Sydney in the east to Esquimalt in the west, from the Falkland Islands in the south to Scapa Flow in the north. This wide variety of bases naturally brought with it a wide variety of animals to see, and to collect. Sailors tended to buy or trap animals as pets; exotic birds were the most common (it was not unusual for ships stopping at Malta to purchase several hundred local birds), followed closely by monkeys and mongeese, as well as the more prosaic cats and dogs. Ships might also adopt an animal from the base at which they were stationed as a mascot. Ships stationed at Esquimalt frequently adopted black bear cubs as mascots, while those stationed at Malta had goats, which were all but synonymous with the island in the RN. Ships at the Falklands might even adopt penguins. This lasted well into the 20th Century - in 1952, there were suggestions that HMS Ceylon might adopt an elephant, to match the ship's crest - and the practice was ultimately banned in 1975.

Many of these mascots would eventually outgrow the relatively tight confines of a warship. The RN solved this problem by establishing a zoo at the gunnery training base HMS Excellent, on Portsmouth's Whale Island. The Whale Island zoo was founded in 1893, and closed in 1940, thanks to the threat from German bombers attacking the naval base. It housed a panoply of animals, in conditions that were not unusual for zoos of this period. Some of its more famous residents included Amelia, a black bear donated by the crew of HMS Grafton, Calliope Jack, a parrot which rode out a hurricane in Samoa aboard HMS Calliope in 1889, and a polar bear called Barbara, found drifting on an ice flow as a cub by an unnamed light cruiser.