Obviously, tigers weren’t harmless—they were apex predators, after all, endowed with awesome strength and terrific abilities. And humans were, at the end of the day, edible meat. But when one considers their actual menace compared to other animals, it becomes obvious that the danger they posed was greatly exaggerated. The annual government gazettes from the period clearly show that other animals presented a significantly greater threat to humans than tigers. Poisonous snakes, for example, consistently killed twenty times as many people in India as tigers throughout the nineteenth and early
...more
