TIGER SHOOTING IN INDIA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 12663, 17 September 1904, Page 5 (Supplement)

TIGER SHOOTING IN INDIA.

In the hot weather there is in "most parts tiger shooting, but' it must be in the torrid season, when the pools and tanks are dried up, the jungles bare, the soil so burning that the tiger lies hidden, afraid for his soft feet, and high to the only water. For this royal sport trained elephants would be necessary, and they are expensive animals to keep. That is a sort of warfare again; the mahouts spiking their brutes along, with the beaters on either flank and the tom-toms and fireworks in front; and presently through the yellow grass, striped just like himself with bars of gold light and dark shadow, iilinks the murderer of the forest, whose time has come to pay for the cows and women and children he has killed. This is the royal way. I never knew a rajah who had our patience to sit on the fork of a tree or in a machan and wait all night over the carcase of a buffalo 01 a goat for a chance tiger. They like to have the big game driven past a stand specially constructed, and there are in India attached to t|ie palaces many shikargahs, 01 hunting grounds, where this arrangement can be carried out as from a screen in grouse driving. In old times, and in some parts even to-day, a pastime of a questionable kind was de# rived by their highnesses out of the jauwarkhana attached to many of their palaces. This was the wild beast place, faced up with dens and cages for various jungle animals, and having in the middle an arena strongly walled, wherein combatw could be carried on between them, sometimes with men. In former days i;hese domestic gladiatorial shows were -often as luxurious and brutal as those of ancient Rome, since no expense was spared by selfish and vicious princes in collecting and training ferocious creatures and arranging the savage contests between those pitted, in pairs, or matched against human combatants. All these snorts, very often shameful and worse than shameful, "are chiefly matters of the past, A healthier spirit has come into fashion, partly from the example of British gymnastics and partly through. the better intelligence and education of the native chiefs.—The Windsor Magazine.