3 Review(s)

Tiger Tales, edited by K. Ullas Karanth, takes you on a journey to the captivating world of deeply felt personal experiences and thoughtful reflections by hunters, amateur naturalists and wildlife scientists who encountered the most charismatic of all animal species – tigers. With its judicious combination of adventure, natural history and tiger science, this book will appeal to wildlife enthusiasts and conservationists. Summary of the Book The first section of this book talks about tiger hunting and old-style natural history, and revives some of the earliest essays on the tiger. Historian Mahesh Rangarajan's overview of the pre-colonial and colonial periods, when pitiless hunting of tigers was a major social attitude, sets the stage for English forester C.E.M. Russell's account of tiger hunting in Mysore, published in the year 1900. There are also stories told by hunter-naturalists like Kenneth Anderson, Fred Champion, Dunbar Brander, William Bazé and Arthur Locke. The reports by more recent and less arguably bloodthirsty hunters like Kesri Singh, a game manager in princely India, and Jack Denton Scott, an American safari hunter, provide forbidding examples of the massacre of tigers. The second section brings stories from the post-colonial period. This is the era about the sheer joy of watching tigers, a concept that emerged to save this splendid cat from the verge of extinction. Essays by forest managers like Andries Hoogerwerf, Kailash Sankhala and Vladimir Troinin, who were fascinated by the tiger, are accompanied by the writings of sensitive amateur naturalists like E.P. Gee, Arjan Singh and Valmik Thapar. The last section of the book talks about the world of modern tiger science and conservation. A description of the first-ever scientific study of tigers by George Schaller is also included, along with the observations of other biologists like John Seidensticker, Mel Sunquist, Dale Miquelle and John Goodrich, who followed in Schaller's footsteps and created new perceptions into tiger ecology and behaviour. The concluding essay, by Geoffrey Ward, a naturalist-historian, provides a coherent overview of the present tiger conservation issues. About K. Ullas Karanth K. Ullas Karanth is an esteemed Indian conservation zoologist and tiger scientist. He was born in Puttur, Karnataka. He is associated with the New York based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) as a Senior Conservation Scientist and as the Technical Director of the WCS Tiger Conservation Programme. He has been honoured with the Padma Shri award for this pioneering and extraordinary work towards environment protection and wildlife conservation. A View from the Machan, Monitoring Tigers and Their Prey and Camera Traps in Animal Ecology are some of his other works. He has also penned a few books in Kannada. Most of his writings have been published in various journals across the world.