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Then, too, some beasts cure themselves by a short fast, like wolves Cf. Aelian, De Natura Animal. iv. 15; see the hippopotamus in Amm. Marc. xx. 15. 23. and lions who, when they are surfeited with flesh, lie still for a while, basking in the sun. And they say a tigress, if a kid is given her, will keep fasting for two days without eating; on the third, she grows hungry and asks for some other food. She will even pull her cage to pieces, but will not touch the kid which she has now come to regard as a fellow-boarder and room mate.Of a leopard in Aelian, De Natura Animal. vi. 2. This account seems to indicate a lacuna in our text explaining why the tigress did not eat the kid in the first place: because she had already had enough to eat.
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Yet again, they relate that elephants employ surgery: they do, in fact, bring aid to the woundedFor an example see the anecdote of Porus in 970 d supra, 977 b infra; Juba, frag. 52 (Jacoby); Aelian, De Natura Animal. vii. 45. by easily and harmlessly drawing out spears and javelins and arrows without any laceration of the flesh. And Cretan goats, Cf. 991 f infra; Philo, 38 (p. 119); Vergil, Aen. xii. 415; Thompson on Aristotle, Historia Animal. ix. 6 (612 a 3); Pease, Melanges Marouzeau, 1948, p. 472. when they eat dittany,Cretan dittany (Origanum dictamnus L.); Pliny, Nat. Hist. xx. 156. easily expel arrows from their bodies and so have presented an easy lesson for women with child to take to heart, that the herb has an abortive property Cf. Pease, op. cit. p. 471.; for there is nothing except dittany that the goats, when they are wounded, rush to search for.
