tes should be communicated with so that an Act for the Protection of
Wild Birds may be provided for every part of India. It would be
superfluous to adduce here the numerous and evident advantages that would
arise from the protection of wild birds, as their value is now so
universally recognized, and I therefore pass on to offer a few brief
remarks on game preservation, or, to speak more exactly, of the
preservation of those wild birds and harmless animals which are useful as
food.

The neglect of game preservation in India has not only been a cause of
great loss to the country owing to the reckless waste of the sources of
valuable supplies of food, but has severely injured the farmers in jungly
tracts in a way that seems hitherto to have escaped notice. I allude to
the fact that, in consequence of the wanton destruction of game in the
western forests, tigers are compelled to inflict much greater losses on
the herds of the natives. This is a fact to which I can personally
testify, and which has since the middle of 1892 become steadily more
apparent; for, when game was more plentiful in the forests along the
crests, and at the foot of the Ghauts, the tigers lived largely upon game
and rarely attacked cattle; indeed, so much was this the case that, about
thirty years ago, a native who had the most outlying farm on the crests of
the Ghauts told me that though tigers were constantly about they had never
attacked his cattle. And as I was at the time living near his house, and
clearing land for planting, and never got a shot at a tiger when residing
there, I am sure that his statement was correct. But since that time
English guns have become common, and the destruction of game of all kinds
and of any age has gone on apace, and the result is that the tigers, which
used to confine themselves mainly to preying on wild animals in the
forests, have been forced to fall upon the village cattle, and I have
never known tigers to be more destructive than they are now. On a single
day this year no less than seven cattle were killed by tigers at one
village, and an old planter of more than thirty years' standing, a near
neighbour of mine, alluding to the subject in a recent letter, said, "Yes,
there have been more tigers about this year than I have ever known." But
it is not only on account of the supply of food from game, and for the
sake of the cattle of the natives that a Game Preservation Act is urgently
required, it is also urgently n