SPEEDING UP JUNGLE

Taranaki Daily News, 3 November 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

SPEEDING UP JUNGLE

A LION IN THE AIR. All the world is growing air-minded. Even the animals are taking to travel by the plane, says the Children’s Newspaper. . Imperial Airways reports that it nas brought a lion by aeroplane to England, providing for him a special cage. But the monarch of the jungle is not the sole monarch of the air. Alligators come as second-class passengers in crates. These imposing creatures are joined by a whole host of smaller fry. Among them fish claim precedence because of their singularity, though there is a special reason for hurrying some of these by air. Tropical fish would suffer on a long voyage and the shortened aeroplane journey gives them a better chance of being welcomed as the paying guests of the public at the Zoo. Even stranger are the travelling locusts. One of the disadvantages of tropical and semi-tropical countries is that the locust is only too ready to take wings. But if ever this activity is to be curtailed the scientific zoologists must know more about the locust s way of life. For this purpose the disagreeable insects are given an assisted passage in a crate all the way from Africa to England. Here work will be found for them, though it might also be said of them, in the words of the poet, that all unmindful of their doom the little victims play. Other plane passengers of the animal world are sent on their way with kindlier intent, cats and dogs of high degree, for example, and day-old chicks for poultry farms. Each year the list of flying livestock grows. But as odd a passenger among them as any was a circus horse who came from Paris to perform in London.