Page:The Fauna of British India, including Ceylon and Burma (Mammalia).djvu/101

Rh It is well known that, although tigers as a rule kill their own food, they do not disdain carrion; in numerous instances they have been known to eat animals killed by sportsmen and even bullocks that had died of disease. Cases are even on record in which a tiger that had been shot has been devoured by another of his own species.

The ordinary game- or cattle-eating tiger is the greatest of cowards in the presence of man, and often allows himself to be pelted off from the animal he has seized. Sterndale mentions a case in which a herdsman laid his heavy iron-bound staff with impunity across the back of a tiger who had seized one of his cows; and I once found two young children, the eldest not more than 8 or 9 years old, left in jungle to drive a tiger away from the body of a bullock he had killed, and to prevent his eating it or dragging it away. The half-wild inhabitants of the Indian forests have but little fear of ordinary tigers; and after some 20 years' wanderings in large part through tracts infested with tigers, I agree with Forsyth that, except in the haunts of a man-eater, there is little danger in traversing any part of the jungles. Bears are, I think, more to be feared than tigers. The only tigers not being man-eaters that are dangerous are tigresses with young cubs, and occasionally a hungry tiger who has just killed his prey. Of course this only refers to unwounded tigers; a tiger that has been wounded will usually attack any one who approaches him, but even he will not charge home against a body of men, and one successful method of shooting tigers and following them when wounded is founded on this circumstance.

The man-eater is, to quote Forsyth, "a tiger who has got very fat and heavy, or very old, or who has been disabled by a wound, or a tigress who has had to bring up young cubs where other game is scarce. All these take naturally to man, who is the easiest animal of all to kill, as soon as failure with other prey brings on the pangs of hunger." A tiger that has once taken to man-eating will probably, having got over his innate fear of the human species, continue to live upon the same prey, though it is the exception for even man-eaters to confine themsehes to human food. Still a few do so to a great extent, and a fearful scourge such a tiger becomes. The destruction of human life by tigers is still considerable in India, and the whole takes place in comparatively thinly peopled portions of the couutry. Thus in Lower Bengal alone in six years 1860–66, 4218 persons were killed by these animals. In all probability nearly the whole destruction was caused by a very small percentage of the tigers inhabiting the country.

Forsyth says that great grazing districts, into which cattle come for a limited season only, are always the worst for producing man-eating tigers. There is much reason for believing that a tigress, who has taken to preying upon man, brings up her cubs to the same mode of life. A man-eater generally becomes cunning and suspicious beyond all ordinary tigers, and around this, the most terrible of all wild animals, myths and legends centre until it is difficult to know what is true and what is false. Many of the