Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 June 1884 — The Struggle for Existence in India. [ARTICLE]

The Struggle for Existence in India.

Take the returns for seven years, we find that man has killed about one hundred and forty thousand wild beasts, tigers, bears, leopards, wolves, hyenas and others—or about twenty thousand annually. During the same period the beasts have destroyed twen-ty-eight thousand human beings, or four thousand a year. Taking the respective rates of the reproduction of species, human and feral, it is obvious, that there is very little to choose between the two lists of casualties, and that the beasts will make good the deficiencies in their numbers as quickly as, if not sooner than, the human beings. On the side of the tigers and their allies has to be added the advantage gained by having killed during the same seven years an annual average of forty-five thousand head of cattle, or a total of about three hundred and forty thousand, and inflicted, further, a monetary expenditure upon government of about ten thousand pounds a year. The balance, therefore, roughly stated, stands thus: One human being, with eleven head of cattle and three pounds in cash for every five wild beasts. In the great fight with the snakes, the advantage, numerically, is immensely in favor of humanity ; for while the reptiles killed about eighteen thousand human beings every year, and about three thousand.cattle, tliey lost of their own numbers nearly two hundred thousand annually. Here again, however, the question of reproduction ought to be considered, and it will be seen that the outcome of the conflict is really very evenly balanced, for a given numoer of snakeswill add two hundred thousand to their numbers in a far* shorter time than the same number of human beings will add eighteen thousand. So that as the question of extermination stands in India to-day, it seems just as probable that men and their domestic cattle will be extinct before the wild beasts and venomous snakes.