The question of course was… how the hell did a giraffe get to Bengal in the first place?

https://open.substack.com/pub/travelsofsamwise/p/the-sultan-of-bengals-giraffe?r=1wlet9

Paid article.

Cool. Global trade in antiquity was more extensive than we previously thought. Usually though it manifested in finding coins from distant lands or coral jewelry. Giraffe though wow.

Over at PugJesus' history arts community, he recently posted Chinese pottery that had a highly zebra-like pattern. I did some searching at the time, and found that both zebra imagery and information made it that far east from Africa, hundreds of years ago. IIRC even a couple live animals were brought over for some reason.

I guess giraffes might roughly be in that same boat. Harder to move around, but perhaps less ornery than zebras.