No matter how much I admire Sri Nripendra Narayana, the Maharaja of Cooch-Behar... what's not to admire about him? To hunt like he did, to live in a princely life in general, from coctails with Edward VII to Oriental splendour at home - AND to go down as the best ruler of his state of all times! In a story published in the Russian edition of Sports Afield, I dubbed him "the man who defied Kipling" - East and West met very comfortably and fruitfully within this person.

But, no matter how much I admire the man, the book "Thirty-Seven Years of Big-Game Shooting" is mostly boring. 80% of the text is nothing but accounting: went here, shot a tiger, went there, jumped a rhino, rhino gored an elephant and got away. The other 20%, when Nripendra can or would give details, however, are fast and exciting, and you can see easily how he held old sports at coctail parties in London and Paris spellbound.

And yet accounting is precisely what makes "37 years" so valuable today. You know the official version for the hunting ban in India: that it was a white man's thing, the evil colonizers taught the poor innocent Indians to hunt for sport, and thus they between them destroyed the subcontinent's fauna. Normally, such claims are difficult to refute, as there's little or no data. But Sri Nripendra's book provides evidence that at least in one kingdom these princely hunts were perfectly sustainable.

So,

H0: Maharaja Cooch-Behar's hunts were destructive.
H1: Maharaja Cooch-Behar's hunts were sustainable.

If H0 is true, then the number or size of animals bagged would decrease over time, especially since we're talking about 40-year period. But the size and number of trophies over the years does not show an upward or downward trend, when considered against time spent hunting. Therefore, H0 is wrong, and H1 is correct.

I'm a bit sorry I didn't do a proper stat analysis, but the numbers are really pretty clear.

Below is a link to a story I wrote about it for BookYourHunt, it dwells on this in more detail, and also gives a couple of extracts from "Thirty-Seven Years..." Maharaja Cooch-Behar, or, Why is there no hunting in India?