THE INDIAN JUNGLE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume IV, Issue 221, 19 August 1931, Page 11

THE INDIAN JUNGLE.

SOME OF THE DANGERS. Mi V. Maitland, of the Central Provinces in India, who is visiting Sydney, said that the natives in the country in India were usually more afraid of black bears and panthers than tigers, but every few years a man-eating tiger terrised the countryside.. The animal would never attack a party of men, but watched the villages and learned the habits of the occupants. Dense thickets of undergrowth .among the teak trees enabled him to approach to within a few yards of the villages. In spite of precautions, natives were killed one after another. An old woman, for instance, would leave her home to fetch water from a shallow well, and would not return. Solitary hunters or herdsmen searching for cattle would be pounced upon from the jungle Even if the natives heard a cry from the victim and armed themselves they rarely found the man, whom the tiger dragged into tlie thickest part of the jungle. Mr. Maitland said that sometimes the natives, alarmed by the depredation of the man-eating tiger, loaded every portable object they possessed, and left their village in a body for another part of the province.