In ancient Rome people were enthusiastic about exotic animals in many different ways. It wasn’t just gladiators who fought in the Colosseum in Rome and many other theaters: animal baiting attracted crowds of visitors; over around 700 years, hundreds of thousands of animals were turned against each other or slaughtered by human fighters. If a person was sentenced to the death penalty “damnatio ad bestias”, he was thrown to the wild animals. These were bears, lions or tigers, and sometimes there was also a well-traveled ostrich.
