Each male animal uses his weapons in his own peculiar fashion. The
common ram makes a charge and butts with such force with the bases of
his horns, that I have seen a powerful man knocked over like a child.
Goats and certain species of sheep, for instance the Ovis cycloceros of
Afghanistan (22. Mr. Blyth, in Land and Water, March, 1867, p. 134,
on the authority of Capt. Hutton and others. For the wild Pembrokeshire
goats, see the Field, 1869, p. 150.), rear on their hind legs, and
then not only butt, but make a cut down and a jerk up, with the ribbed
front of their scimitar-shaped horn, as with a sabre. When the O.
cycloceros attacked a large domestic ram, who was a noted bruiser, he
conquered him by the sheer novelty of his mode of fighting, always
closing at once with his adversary, and catching him across the face
and nose with a sharp drawing jerk of the head, and then bounding out
of the way before the blow could be returned. In Pembrokeshire a male
goat, the master of a flock which during several generations had run
wild, was known to have killed several males in single combat; this
goat possessed enormous horns, measuring thirty-nine inches in a
straight line from tip to tip. The common bull, as every one knows,
gores and tosses his opponent; but the Italian buffalo is said never to
use his horns: he gives a tremendous blow with his convex forehead, and
then tramples on his fallen enemy with his knees an instinct which the
common bull does not possess. (23. M. E.M. Bailly, Sur l usage des
cornes, etc., .Annal des Sciences Nat. tom. ii. 1824, p. 369.) Hence
a dog who pins a buffalo by the nose is immediately crushed. We must,
however, remember that the Italian buffalo has been long domesticated,
and it is by no means certain that the wild parent-form had similar
horns. Mr. Bartlett informs me that when a female Cape buffalo (Bubalus
caffer) was turned into an enclosure with a bull of the same species,
she attacked him, and he in return pushed her about with great
violence. But it was manifest to Mr. Bartlett that, had not the bull
shewn dignified forbearance, he could easily have killed her by a
single lateral thrust with his immense horns. The giraffe uses his
short, hair-covered horns, which are rather longer in the male than in
the female, in a curious manner; for, with his long neck, he swings his
head to either side, almost upside down, with such force that I have
seen a hard plank deeply indented by a single blow.
[Fig. 63. Oryx leucoryx, male (from the Knowsley Menagerie).]
536