The Lion House of the Zoological Park was completed, excepting a few minor details, early in the year 1903, and was formally opened to the public in February. It is 244 feet long, 115 feet wide, including the outdoor cages, and its cost when completed reached $150,000. The materials of the building are the same kind as those used in the Reptile House and Primate House, but the animal sculptures, all by Mr. Eli Harvey, are more abundant and conspicuous than on any other structure erected heretofore. The building contains 13 indoor cages, and 9 outdoor cages, and between the two there is free communication. The sizes of the various cages are as follows:
Interior cages: Largest, 14 feet wide, 22 feet deep; smallest, 13 feet wide, 14 feet high.
Exterior cages: two end cages, 40x44 feet, 17 feet high; central cage, 40 feet square, 14 feet high; smallest, 13 feet wide, 12 feet deep, 13 feet high.
Excepting for the single fact of having interior and exterior cages, the Lion House of the Zoological Park is--like the Primate House--an entirely original development. Its most important new features are as follows:
All cage service, the introducing and withdrawal of animals, is conducted from the rear, by means of a track underneath the sleeping dens, and an elevating platform car.
The communication between indoor and outdoor cages is direct and continuous.
Instead of upright iron bars, all the cage fronts are of hard-steel wire netting, in rectangular pattern, attached to wrought iron frames. This is considered by the Zoological Society a great improvement upon the heavy bar-work hitherto in universal use for cage fronts in lion houses.
The space above the sleeping dens has been developed as a sunlit balcony, whereon the animals will be very conspicuous, even to large crowds of visitors.
Jungle-green tiling, impervious to moisture and dirt, is used as a back-ground for the animals.
The Lion is an animal of perpetual interest, but like every other noteworthy wild animal, its haunts are constantly being claimed by civilization, and its members are rapidly decreasing. It is not a difficult matter to exterminate or drive out from a given territory any large and conspicuous quadruped, and at the present rate of settlement and industrial development in Africa, it may easily come to pass that by the end of the present century, the king of beasts will be without a home, outside of zoological collections.