Wild game - tiger hunts to drones

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Wild game
In the late nineteenth century, travelling abroad had suddenly become easier and cheaper for well-off Europeans than ever before, and this, combined with the high tide of the British Empire gave rise to the craze for tiger hunting. A great many upper-class young men went off to the wilds, especially India, to bag themselves a tiger rug for a proud family heirloom. Although tiger hunting had been a popular royal sport for years in India, during the British Raj, the greater fire-power, willingness to kill among the colonists and habitat loss had huge consequences, reducing the tiger population in India from 40,000 to less than 1,800 in a hundred years.

The Shoot would involve riding on a horse or elephant or even being carried in a rustic sedan-chair while servants or slaves carried crates of food, clothing and other necessities of comfortable living. Once the animal had been scared into the open by native beaters, the intrepid chap could fire his rifle, at no great risk to himself.

In the USA, bear hunting enjoyed a similar fashion among those who would be macho, and wanted to go further than sniping at buffalo herds from trains. A celebrated Washington Post cartoon of Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosvelt cornering a skinny, big-eyed little animal gave the teddy bear its name. Modern-day hunts are open to women, too. They, and their male friends, may enjoy even greater levels of comfort and convenience as they pick off their prey with a stab of the mouse at their computer consoles, linked to a sniping device in Palestine or a ‘no-reply’ drone anywhere the natives are said to be restless.

The majority surviving tigers which in nature would share a borderless open world with other creatures, keeping to their own mutually exclusive paths, live now in captivity, which means cages with rain. The hunt continues, and war is waged, increasingly on ordinary people who have not even had the courtesy of a declaration of war.