Uncle Dick and Lisa's Old Time Animal Tales

 

     A writer in the Cornhill Magazine, reviewing the many good works done by the English for the people of India, notes among other things, the almost total extermination of wild animals in that country.

     As the rural communities relinquished their hamlets and drew closer together toward the centre of a district, he says, the wild beasts pressed hungrily on their rear. In vain the East India Company offered a reward for each tiger’s head sufficient to maintain a peasant’s family in comfort for three months-an item of which the English officers deemed so important that when, in the financial crisis of 1790-91, the Treasury had to suspend all payments, it made the tiger money and diet allowance for prisoners the sole exceptions to the rule. In vain it spent the whole revnue of a frontier district in rewards for killing wild beasts. A belt of jungle filled with ferocious animals lay for years around the cultivated land. The official records frequently speak of the mail-bag being carried off by tigers, and the custom of the mail-runners carrying jaugling rings or bells to scare away the wild beasts survived to our own day. Lord Cornwallis, in 1789, had to sanction a grant of public money to free the military road from the depredations of these animals.

     The ravages of the wild elephants were on a larger soule, and their extermination formed one of the most important duties of the British officers after the country passed under English rule. Tigers, leopards, and wolves slew their thousands of men and their hundreds of thousands of cattle. But the herd of wild elephants was absolutely resistless, lifting off roofs, pushing down walls, trampling a village underfoot as if it were a city of sand which a child had built upon the shore. In two parishes alone, during the last few years of the native administration, fifty-six hamlets with their surrounding lands had all been destroyed and gone to jungle caused by the depredations of wild elephants. Another official return states that forty market villages throughout Birbhum district had been deserted from the same cause. Large reductions had to be made in the land-tax, and the East India Company borrowed tame elephants from the native Viceroy’s stud in order to catch the wild ones. “I had ocular proof on my journey,” writes an English officer in 1791, “of the ravages, the poor timid native ties his cot in a tree, to which he retires when the elephants approach, and silently views the destruction of his cottage and the whole profits of his labor.” “One night,” writes an English surveyor’ in 1810, although I had a guard, the men of the village close to my tent retired to the trees, and the women hid themselves among the cattle, leaving their huts a prey to the elephants, which know very well where to look for grain. Two nights before, some of them had unroofed a hut in the village and had eaten up all the grain which a poor family possessed. Most fortunately for the population of the country, wrote the greatest elephant-hunter of the last century, ” they delight in the soquestored range of the mountains; if they preferred the plains, whole kingdoms would be laid waste.”

     All this is now changed. One of the complaints by the modern Englishman in India is that he can so seldom get a shot at a tiger. Wolves are dying out in many provinces; the ancient Indian lion has disappered. The wild elephant is so rare that he is specially protected by the Government, and in most parts of India ha can only be caught by official license or under official supervision. Many districts have petitioned for a close season, so as to preserve the edible game remaining. The only animal that had defied the energy of the British official is the snake. One may, however, judge of the loss of life by wild beasts in the last century from the deaths causes by this, their chief survivor, at the present day. The ascertained number of persons who died from snake-bite in 1875 was 17,000, out of a total of 21,891 killed by snakes and all other wild animals. The deaths from wild beasts in the last century were probably not under 150,000 a year.