2i8 DIARY OF A SPORTSMAN NATURALIST 



A similar but more unavoidable contretemps will be 

 experienced if the sportsman has the bad luck to hit on a 

 jungle which has been selected for operations by wild dogs. 

 These animals are the curse of the Indian forests. Once 

 the fact that a pack has arrived in a jungle becomes known 

 to its inmates, the deer, they will hurriedly quit the area, 

 being followed of necessity by the tigers who have no use 

 for the wild dog. In fact most animals appear to have an 

 innate dislike for this animal and desert the area once they 

 are aware that a pack has made its appearance in it. I 

 suffered on several occasions from this curse myself. 

 During my first experiences I was unaware of the cause of 

 the sudden extraordinary absence of animals in a jungle well 

 known to me. On one of the last occasions in which I met 

 with this experience — I had left the Station at the end of the 

 rains to visit a famous jungle a few marches out— I was so 

 annoyed at my bad luck that I devoted three days to the 

 dogs, and although I only picked up three dead I think the 

 tally was larger by several more. I never felt any com- 

 punction in kilhng this scum of the jungle, for every 

 animal they secure, to support what appears to be a worth- 

 less existence, ends its hfe in horrible torture. 



In areas in which wild dogs have become very numerous 

 efforts have been made to poison them. Ordinary poisons 

 such as strychnine and so forth appear to have little effect 

 on the wild dog. He vomits up the poisoned flesh and goes 

 on his way apparently untroubled by the experience. 



When the crops are coming up in the fields, especially in 

 areas of cultivation more or less surrounded by heavy 

 forest, or which are bounded on one or two sides with 

 conterminous heavy forests, the cultivated land stretching 

 away for miles on the other sides, the herbivorous animals 

 and the carnivora which prey upon them will be found to 

 congregate in the forest adjacent to the fields, to which 

 they resort at night to feed. Away back in its deeper 

 recesses the forest will be found, in consequence, to be 

 almost deserted for the time being. In this connexion the 

 bear must not be forgotten, with his sweet tooth and 

 partiaUty for the villager's succulent crops. Even the 

 sambhar, who is chiefly a browsing animal, is much addicted 

 to leaving the recesses of the thick forest, or the hills, in which 

 he spends most of his hfe, to descend to the forest adjacent 

 to the young crops on which he comes out to feed at night. 



