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I have all of Kenneth Anderson's books with me.However, his books are believed to be more on the line of pot boilers than true accounts.The adventures read well,though.Hope you have read Jim Corbett.I got all his collections,too.There is a Tiger census going on in India at the moment.The stats are not encouraging.Man-Animal conflicts and poaching are on the rise.In the Sariska Tiger reserve all the Tigers have vanished and an inquiry is on.Hope we won't lose the Big Stripes for ever.Best-Vikram.

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Vikram,

Yes I heard while in India in December about the Sariska reserve. It still is in the papers. Hopefully a contact there will supply the results of the census to me as well as he promised to. It was supposed to have finalised a week or two ago, so I will email him.

Anderson's books? Yes I could see they may be fictional or have fictional elements. Good reads though. Lots of writers seem to fictionalise their 'accounts'.

Corbett is probably the best hunting author in my opinion and his books were some of the first I ever read. As preparation for a trip to Africa in 1988 I read a lot of African explorers and early hunters accounts and came across Corbett. What a find!



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John aka NitroX

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Govt get out of our lives NOW!
"I love the smell of cordite in the morning."
"A Sharp spear needs no polish"

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An interesting if gruesome photograph.

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Do they destroy the Tiger when it kills a person these days?

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No I do not think so.

I don't think this was a "maneater" incident ie a tiger that hunts and kills humans for food as prey. I think the incident was of a boy that blundered onto the tiger while it was feeding on the cow.

Where there is a 'proper' maneater I think permits are issued and they do try to hunt and kill it. A couple of years ago I read of a couple leopard being shot for this reason.

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As for the value of game, as a guesstimate I worked out Kanha might get in about US$700,000 a year from foreign tourist fees. If they do have 350 tigers in population, several could be hunted as trophies each year, and this could be done away from the tourist areas. I would imagine a trophy fee of US$1 million per tiger would not be that difficult to sell. Even one per year could double the parks forex budget.

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Some of the parks country used to be farming lands of the local people. Many of the large open fields in Kanha and also in Bandhavgargh used to be villages and farming plots. These people were displaced by the creation of the park and I wonder what sort of compensation they got.

Nowadays many of these people act as guides. Each tourist vehicle usually has a resort guide and driver. On entering the parks all the vehicles queued up waiting for the gate opening times. The guides would go off and register at the office and be assigned a 'native guide' which was done by rotation ie the next person on the list. So the quality of the native guide would depend on pure luck depending on their bush skills. Most were very alert and would see game before anyway else and would try to point out things to us, given limited English skills.

We were encouraged to tip these guys if they were good. I imagine they were paid some flat fee for the guiding trip, but we did tip them quite well. Putting theory into practice. These bush skilled guys must get value from the parks else they could well think poaching is a means to an end.

In India where an average wage is only about R3500 per month, about US$75, giving a 'native' guide, especially if he is good, a R100 tip for half a day, doesn't hurt a Westerner much at all, but means a big increase in income for the guide.






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John aka NitroX

...
Govt get out of our lives NOW!
"I love the smell of cordite in the morning."
"A Sharp spear needs no polish"

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ALso personally I think that since they have more than they have room for, VERY controlled hunting could be a good way to raise money for tiger conservation.

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I agree. But I think neither the political will nor inclination is there.




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John aka NitroX

...
Govt get out of our lives NOW!
"I love the smell of cordite in the morning."
"A Sharp spear needs no polish"

Post Extras: