Many rural communities did have their own methods for dealing with tigers—after all, they had been living alongside them for hundreds if not thousands of years. In 1815, for example, a judge in Madras reported how seven hundred villagers “formed a Circle round [a] Tyger” that had been terrorizing their lands and finished it off with spears. There are similar accounts of villages banding together to use nets and even poisoned arrows to get rid of problematic tigers—something the British, who generally lived in cities and bungalows far removed from any actual threat of tiger predation, had the
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