The tiger, as the figures show, makes a very handsome fight against man.
But it is nothing to the elephant's fight. The king of beasts, the lord
of the jungle, loses four of his mess per year, but he kills forty--five
persons to make up for it.
But when it comes to killing cattle, the lord of the jungle is not
interested. He kills but 100 in six years--horses of hunters, no doubt
--but in the same six the tiger kills more than 84,000, the leopard
100,000, the bear 4,000, the wolf 70,000, the hyena more than 13,000,
other wild beasts 27,000, and the snakes 19,000, a grand total of more
than 300,000; an average of 50,000 head per year.
In response, the government kills, in the six years, a total of 3,201,232
wild beasts and snakes. Ten for one.
It will be perceived that the snakes are not much interested in cattle;
they kill only 3,000 odd per year. The snakes are much more interested
in man. India swarms with deadly snakes. At the head of the list is the
cobra, the deadliest known to the world, a snake whose bite kills where
the rattlesnake's bite merely entertains.
In India, the annual man-killings by snakes are as uniform, as regular,
and as forecastable as are the tiger-average and the suicide-average.
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