The young 31-year-old hunter Omar Ceballos has hunted one of the great trophies of the 2022-2023 hunting season in our country: an old chamois that hid an emblematic bezoar stone inside. As the hunter announced on his Instagram account, the animal was a twenty-year-old specimen that he managed to hunt in the Pyrenees.
Since ancient times, bezoar has been considered a very valuable object by different societies. It was even believed to have healing properties, especially as an antidote to poisons. In cases of severe poisoning, the bezoar stone was ground in a mortar and diluted in wine as a treatment.
bezoar is a stone that old specimens of chamois and even roe deer.
Bezoars, accumulations of non-digestible substances
The word bezoar comes from the Persian pâdzahr, which means “countervenom” or “antidote”. Actually, these stones are accumulations of non-digestible substances found in the stomachs or intestines of animals such as chamois, ibex and cervids.
The most interesting stones are those that start with materials such as sand and stones and over time form layers of calcium on their surface, similar to oyster pearls, called bezoar stones or bezoar gems because of their beauty, as in this case, and have been considered semi-precious stones by some societies for centuries.
Bezoar stones have appeared throughout history in works of nineteenth-century literature by the Irish writer and playwright Oscar Wilde or in fictional films such as Harry Potter.
