Leaderboard

He found plenty of evidence that common animals were killed in games, and only said that the amount of exotic animals seemed to be wildly exaggerated. By "exotic" I took him to mean in the sense of not only foreign origin but strikingly unusual to Europeans. He did not doubt foreign animals were shipped in, just not that rare species were practically wiped out as has been claimed. If so, this could be commonly deemed as less cruel on a basis I don't agree with. Some animals are thought to be meant for killing vs. others which are too cuddly or noble or whatever. There is a TV series following game wardens where I grew up, and I hate their hypocrisy about "harvesting" animals being noble ways of "feeding the family". It used to be a poor area, but now overfed fat hunters with thousand$ worth of equipment go about needlessly maiming and killing. So I as a vegetarian don't absolve the Romans of animal cruelty, but can consider absolving them of mass-exotic-animal cruelty. He eliminated several other explanations for the utter lack of exotic bones yet abundance of non-exotic ones. I would lean toward an explanation that exotic bones might have been specially processed and removed or ground up for their supposed powers. I don't recall if he adequately disproved this other than to say the elephant ones would be unmanageable. Of course he can't really prove such things, but had a lot of experience of the sloppy way Romans disposed of other bones. I may not have followed his arguments that carefully because I don't like the modern fascination with violent Roman games. It seems to me that horse racing was their bigger passion vs. games which were not held for decades at a time.