Quote:

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It reminds me of Chief Seattle's( chief of a native American tribe, the Suquamish) 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".

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As a person living in the Seattle area for most of my life I will have to disagree that Chief Seattle ever said this. He died in 1866, 3 years before the railway was done to San Francisco and 20 years before it ever arrived in Puget Sound area. He never left the Seattle area and surely never saw or probably ever heard of a Buffalo as the nearest one would have been 1000 miles away. The massacre of the Buffalo would not happen until after he was dead.

I think this quote, which I have also seen in Kruger Park in RSA, is a work of fiction by some writer looking to make a point. Too bad he felt he had to attribute it to a man that surely didn't care one way or the other.

As for Tigers, well it is hard to say looking back how many people they killed or injured. It seems that the horrendous increase in human populations in India since 1948 and the raping of the forests would have a lot to do with their disappearance also.

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Lovu Zdar
Mick

A Man of Pleasure, Enterprise, Wit and Spirit Rare Books, Big Game Hunting, English Rifles, Fishing, Explosives, Chauvinism, Insensitivity, Public Drunkenness and Sloth, Champion of Lost and Unpopular Causes.

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