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Price of a Tiger

I am not trying to determine the price of the human tigers, as they still are quite abundant. Some of them active, some of them retired, and some of them peeping from behind jail cells What with the Sher-e-Punjabs, the Sher-e Sinds and the Sher-e-Pakistans Etc. All the four provinces, and the country, have had, more than their share of such Shers. It is the real Tigers, Panthera tigris tigris, that I am talking about. It would be a difficult thing to put a price on such a rare species even today, but our enlightened rulers of the days gone by, suffered no such qualms in fixing it at a few rupees. This money was paid to whoever killed these magnificent Kings of the Jungle, and their offspring. Mind you, these were not some man eaters like Col. Peterson's lions of Tsavo, or Jim Corbett's tigers of Kumaon; these were perfectly normal, run of the mill types, leading their lives according to the laws of nature, or rather, according to the laws of the Jungle. As such there was no justification to announce rewards and Certificates of Merit for their destruction. This is exactly what the agents of Her Majesty's Government did. I have recently picked up a number of Gazetteers of the late nineteenth century, compiled by the British, who happened to be governing the Sub continent then. Apart from other things of interest, I was shocked by the deliberate destruction and ensuing extinction of the Carnivores of this part of undivided India. These are the same, precious species, which organizations the world over, are trying to protect and re-introduce in areas where they existed or still exist. . The programs being planned and implemented by spending billions now, for the propagation or preservation of these carnivores, cost her Majesty's government a few thousand rupees to annihilate and exterminate, without any apparent justification. The locals were encouraged to wipe out Tigers, Leopards, Wolves, Hyenas, Bears Etc. Etc. Rewards were fixed at Rs. Eight for a mature tiger or tigress and Rs. One to Rs. Three for their cubs, depending upon their size(Rs. 8 = 15 cents U.S and Rs. 1 =2 cents U.S) To top it all, certificates of merit, for bravery, were issued to whoever rid the local populace of these dangerous animals! One such gazetteer gives an account in these words, "Leopards (felis pardus, locally called chitra) are found in all the hill tracts of Hazara.In the Gandgarh hills and in the hills round Khanpur, Tigers(felis tigris, termed by the people samundari) are occasionally met with, but they are rare. The whole species, both of tigers or leopards, are locally called shin or sher. Bears and monkeys are also found in all the hill tracts, where they are great enemies to the autumn maize crops. The bears are not very fierce, and are easily shot by the zamindars; the Gujars(Pala-log) of Kagan frequently kill them with clubs. Hyenas (hyena striata, locally called takkhar) are common in...................". In the next paragraph dealing with rewards paid, it says, "In the five years ending 1882, Rs. 407 were paid for the destruction of 16 Tigers, 43 Leopards, 7 Bears and 4 wolves". This excerpt is from the Gazetteer of Hazara District, 1883-84, published under authority of the Punjab Government, Govt. Of India It is not known how many Carnivores suffered the same cruel fate before 1869. This was just one district alone. And all this happened only, a hundred years ago! How utterly devoid of logic, this state-sponsored slaughter was; I fail to understand. It reminds me of Chief Seattle's( chief of a native American tribe, the Sukuamish) letter to the then President of America, in which he says, "I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the Prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train.. This is the buffalo that we only kill to stay alive. What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone , man would surely die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to man. But I am a savage and do not understand any other way". Apart from officially sponsoring and promoting their whole scale slaughter, there are accounts of British sportsmen, both civil and military, who are accredited with having shot more than a hundred tigers and the same number of leopards. There are a number of biographies and memoirs where the authors have regretted being called back to England before completing their double centuries. George V, Prince of Wales and Emperor of India, in his tour of the sub-continent, shot thirty-nine tigers, eighteen rhinos and four leopards in less than a week. It is strange that the very people who considered themselves the upholders of everything that was fair and just could have been so uncaring and callous, so as to be the perpetuators of this unforgivable crime. But this was their attitude towards wildlife in colonies being governed by them only. As far as their own homeland was concerned, these same British would hang a serf or a peasant, who was guilty of the crime of killing the King's deer.(Maybe due to pangs of hunger, or to feed their children) On the other hand rulers who have been termed barbarians and savages like Genghis Khan the Mongol, Amir Taimur the Lame and Sulaiman the Magnificient, all made laws to protect the wildlife of their domains. The mongol Khan, in his famous Quriltai (gathering of all the mongol people) of 1206, held at the junction of the Onon gol, in Mongolia, decreed the death penalty in the Jasay(Assembly to make laws), for whoever killed birds and animals during the breeding season, or killed their young. Zahiruddin Muhammed Babur (the Lion), founder of Mughal rule in India, took time out from his many and pressing engagements to pen down the various forms of wildlife that he came across, in his Baburnama. Time and again he emphasized the need to preserve them through strict laws. He went to the extent of declaring the summer months (when most of the birds and animals breed) as closed seasons for hunting, and forbade the hunting of female animals, to whichever species they belonged. The last known Tigers were shot along the banks of the Indus, as recently as the first decade of the twentieth century. There were reports of Tigers from the Hazara and Rawalpindi districts till as late as 1926(Both these areas are hilly, mountainous and were thickly forested) There is also a report of a Tigress having been shot by some British officer near Muzaffargarh, along the Indus, in 1936. Would it not be fair to ask Her Majesty's Government for compensation, or better still(as no one can fix a price for even one Tiger lost), to at least put back the number of Carnivores they helped or abetted in exterminating? Strangely enough, the agencies and organizations working in our country, including the IUCN and the WWF, were not aware of this massive slaughter, at the behest of the British Government, despite their vast network and resources at their disposal. Even Roberts does not refer to this in his detailed book on Mammals in Pakistan, for which the Government of Pakistan conferred a Civil award on him.

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