HUNTING TIGERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 811, 11 February 1955, Page 13

HUNTING TIGERS

THE TIGERS OF TRENGGANU, by Lieu- | tenant-Colonel A. Locke; Museum Press, English price 16/-. N spite of the author’s reassurance that not one tiger in a hundred is a man-eater, I for one, having read this absorbing story, shall treat tigers with more respect than ever in future. As a Government Administrative Officer in Malaya, the author hunted them at night, shooting from a camouflaged platform perched precariously in a tree about ten feet above the ground, lighting his target with a torch strapped to the barrel of his rifle. He shot only

those that attacked the villagers in his district or killed their domestic animals, frightened their children on the way to school or made themselves a nuisance in other ways. And to add to the risks, sometimes | he shot them in country ranged by Communist guerrillas. The book contains a great deal of interesting information about the habits of tigers. From a tiger’s pugs he learnt to tell its sex, age and weight, and even to identify individual tigers. He tells the story of his (continued next page)

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(continued from previous page) adventures with a modest directness and clarity that heightens the dramatic effect of some chilling moments: when he had shot a tiger he would follow the wounded animal into the jungle by the light of his torch lest it escape and, enraged by its injuries, endanger the lives of others. But be warned, there are some gruesome details in his story and in some of the illustrations. Grand photographs they are, too, most of them taken

with a folding Brownie.

W.A.

G.