men come near. He got very close to a cow giraffe that had her head in a tree taking a nap. So it seems, the giraffe, like the elephant, sometimes leans up against a tree to sleep. The animal looked at him sleepily a moment and closed her eyes again. As he came nearer she kicked at him. When the rest of the party came up and threw sticks and clods at her, she showed her teeth in an ugly snarl, like a cross dog. Finally she kicked out at them and then trotted away.
Of all the large animals in a menagerie or zoo, the giraffe worries his captors and keepers most. His neck is so long it is always in danger of being broken. He has to have an open sky-light in the roof of his cage to put his head and neck through. Sometimes, in turning around in his small cage, the neck is twisted or a bone snapped. In travelling on a railway, the roof window has to be kept shut, or the first low bridge would catch the head of the animal. He is not ill-tempered, as a rule, but having his eighteen feet of height jammed under a ten-foot roof makes him peevish. Sometimes he refuses to eat, and sometimes he turns vicious and attacks his keeper with his hammer of a head. So, although he looks so gentle, with his mild and beautiful eyes of a deer, you should never go very near a giraffe's cage.
But you should never miss a chance to see one of these strange and interesting animals. Like the bison, or what we call the American buffalo, the grizzly bear, the African elephant, the Bengal tiger, the kangaroo, and many other wild animals, the giraffe has been hunted so long that he is rapidly disappearing. A hundred years from now the children may be able to see only stuffed giraffes in museums of natural history. They will think how lucky the children of our day were to see these queer beasts alive.
