THE PRESENT RANGE OF THE LION IN INDIA. 283 



forest and police sepoys, without let or hindrance, should be put 

 a stop to with no light hand ; and, lastly, the Durbar should, for 

 some years, at any rate, desist from the practice of capturing the 

 cubs. Without some such measure to back up its order prohibiting 

 the killing of the Lions, the latter will not be of much avail. 



" The damage is not done by the occasional shikar parties 

 which kill a Lion, perhaps one in two or three years, but by the 

 capturing of the cubs, in effecting which, as often as not, the 

 mother is killed ; by the indiscriminate slaughter of the Deer, the 

 Lion's natural prey, which necessitates its taking to killing 

 cattle — a habit which, sooner or later, leads to its death, 

 and chiefly by the reckless destruction of the forest which is 

 allowed to go on. When the forest disappears nothing will save 

 the Lions ; they cannot exist without it any more than fish can 

 exist without water. 



" It is strange how the theory that the Kathiawar Lion is 

 devoid of a mane should have been started, but once having been 

 so, there has been no want of writers to keep up the fallacy. 

 During a residence of twelve years in the province I have seen 

 many Lions, both in their wild state in the Grir as well as in 

 captivity in the Junagarh State gardens ; but I have yet to see a 

 full-grown Lion without a mane. They all possess this appendage 

 to a more or less degree, according to age, and some of the older 

 beasts I have seen carried manes which, though scantier than those 

 of menagerie Lions from Africa, would, I am sure, have lost but 

 little by comparison with their African brothers in a wild state. 

 As a rule, the manes of the captive Lions in the Junagarh gardens 

 are longer and shaggier than those of the wild animals ; but, owing 

 to their habit of avoiding thorny jungle, there is not much to 

 choose in this respect between the two. A Lion when taking his 

 walks abroad invariably follows the cattle tracks and paths which 

 intersect the jungle in all directions, and for resting during the 

 day he prefers to any other covert the shade of a large banyan 

 tree, where the cool breeze will reach him. 



"The statement made in the * Badminton Library,'* that a 

 black mane is unknown in India, is not correct. In the account 

 of the Kathiawar Lion given in vol. viii. of the ' Bombay Gazeteer,' 

 which was contributed by a well-known Kathiawar sportsman, who 



* 'Big Game Shooting' (India, by Lieut. -Col. E. Heber Percy), vol. ii. 

 p. 194. 



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