Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore: With chapters on coffee planting in Coorg, the Mysore representative assembly, the Indian congress, caste and the Indian silver question, being the 38 years' experiences of a Mysore planterElliot, Robert H. (Robert Henry)
History
Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore: With chapters on coffee planting in Coorg, the Mysore representative assembly, the Indian congress, caste and the Indian silver question, being the 38 years' experiences of a Mysore planter
Elliot, Robert H. (Robert Henry)
Caste -- India; Coffee; Karnataka (India) -- Description and travel; Karnataka (India) -- Politics and government
This tiger is known as the lame tiger from being so in the right fore
leg--the result of an old wound probably--and some ten days after my
wounding him a curious coincidence happened. A young married lady, who was
at the time on a visit to my bungalow, had expressed a great wish to see a
tiger, and, when leaving for Bangalore in her bullock coach between nine
and ten o'clock one night, very nearly saw the lame tiger. He was standing
in the road some miles from my house, at a sharp bend where the road
deflects abruptly to cross a Nullah, and waited till the coach got within
ten or fifteen yards of him, whereupon, after delivering three moderate
growls, he limped down off the road, and stood for a moment looking at the
coach and bullocks.
All sportsmen must regret the necessity for tying out live bait for
tigers, but this is really a fully justifiable proceeding, as thereby an
immense amount of pain is saved to animal life in general, and an immense
sum of money to the native population. The destruction of cattle by
tigers is really enormous, and, I believe, far exceeding that reported to
Government, and it is so mainly because the tiger is only allowed to eat a
fraction of what he kills, as the moment that news of a bullock being
killed reaches the village, the low class natives at once proceed to the
spot, drive away the tiger, and carry off the beef. And this is only
prevented when an English sportsman is within reach, in which case the
cattle owners prevent the people from touching the carcase. It is often
very annoying when tying out baits for tigers, to find them destroyed by
panthers, as the panther, of course, from his habit of climbing trees, and
concealing himself in the foliage, and from a kind of general facility
that he seems to have for getting out of the way, is a difficult animal to
find, in fact so much so, that I latterly would never go out after one,
unless it had killed quite close at hand. In 1891 I was once much annoyed
to find that a new kind of bait with an additional attraction had been
quite ruined by a panther. This attraction consisted of a goat picketed in
an open-topped (that was the mistake, it ought to have been closed) wooden
cage which was placed in the branches of a tree, on the edge of the
jungle, and about fifteen feet from the ground, while a bullock was
picketed on the ground in the open land, about twenty yards away. The
theory was that the, to a tiger, attractive aroma of the goat would be
widely diffused, and that he might, too, further attract the tiger by his
cries. News (false as it afterwards turned out to be) was brought in that
a tiger had killed the bullock, and I toiled up on to the mountain some
seven miles away from my bungalow, merely to find that a panther had
killed the bullock and that my goat was hanging dead by the neck outside
the cage just like a carcase in a butcher's shop. The panther had seized
the goat, killed it, and jumped out of the cage with it, and had either
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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