native States 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 needed in order to check the abominable cruelties committed by the native hunters.  Writing to me with reference to this subject, Colonel J. P. Grant, the head of the Survey and Settlement Service, observes as follows: