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124 GUIDE TO THE 
single buffalo is generally seized and dragged to the ground 
without the chance of using his horns. Sir Joseph Fayrer 
says that the tiger “ watches the cattle, creeps stealthily 
out until within springing or rather rushing distance, then, 
with a rush or bound and a roar or deep growl, he seizes 
one of the herd by the throat and drags or strikes it to the 
ground with his formidable arm, fixes his fangs in the 
throat, and his powerful fore-claws in the trunk, or neck, 
and holds it there until it is nearly or quite dead, when 
he drags it off to the jungle to be devoured at leisure. ” 
The favourite food of the tiger, however, is the wild pig 
and some of the smaller deer and antelopes, but when its 
appetite is depraved it takes to eating man. When such 
tigers have offspring at the time, families of man-eaters are 
thus reared which not unfrequently cause extensive districts 
of country to be deserted owing to their fearful destruction 
of human life. In the Central Provinces “ a single tigress 
caused the desertion of thirteen villages, and two hundred 
and fifty square miles of country were thrown out of culti¬ 
vation. ” Again “ one tiger, in 1867-8"9, killed, respectively, 
twenty-seven, thirty-four, forty-seven people,” and it “ once 
killed a father, mother, and three children ; and the week 
before it was shot, it killed seven people. ” The most 
interesting donation of tigers to the Gardens has been that 
of two tigers and a tigress, supposed to be man-eaters, and 
which were entrapped in pitfalls near Hazaribagh by Babu 
Rameshwari Prasad Narain Sing, Zamindar of Mukshud- 
pur, in the Gaya District. The tiger and tigress sent 
in 1878 were said to belong to a family of six or seven 
of which two others were killed when these were cap¬ 
tured, and one of the slain was a notable man-eating 
tigress. During the preceding two years upwards of 200 
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