Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 September 1883 — The Tiger and His Victims. [ARTICLE]

The Tiger and His Victims.

As a matter of fact, the tiger is not a specially ferocious animal. As the greatest authority on Indian natural history says, it is “a harmless, timid animal.” It feeds on animals that are prodigiously injurious to crops, and there are on record in India the complaints of villagers on the increase of deer and wild pigs in consequence of the destruction of the tigers in their neighborhood. When it gets too feeble to catch wild animals it begins to eat • tame ones, or, easier victims still, th© men or women who are in charge of the cattle. It then becomes, as a “maneater,” a criminal against humanity—and death cannot overtake it too soon. But it is only those who know the Hindoo thoroughly who can credit it the amazing apathy of these men, even when in imminent danger. So long as it is not actually visible they refuse to take precaution against peril, and I remember during the Afghan war assisting to thrash some lazy followers in order to arouse them to a proper sense of the necessity of saving their lives. They had squatted down to smoke by the roadside in the Khyber pass, though they knew the enemy was lurking in the rocks above them and in the jungle behind them; though they had with their own eyes seen the corpses of camp-followers lying where they had been murdered when they sat down to smoke. In the very same way the herdsman comes loafing home in the twilight, singing a song of the country as he goes (to let the tiger know that he is coming, probably) and suddenly out of the sugar-canes flashes the tiger, and there is an end of that herdsman. But the next man will probably do the very same thing. He will take another road, of course, on his way home, but he will lag behind his cattle and sing to himself in the same ridiculous way, and out from under the bair tree springs the same old tiger. Indeed, it is one of the problems of Indian Administration how to keep the natives from suicide. They prefer to have half the villiage down with small-pox and then to carry a dead chicken round the stricken hamlet on the end of a pole than to be vaccinated. They prefer to lose a prodigious number of their acquaintances by drowning than to protect their wells. They prefer to have tens of thousands of men and women bitten by snakes in the toes and thumbs and die therefrom than let enough light into a hut to see the difference between firewood and cobras.—Belgravia.