In December of 1911, the freshly crowned King George V went on an elephant-borne shikar to Nepal, during which he and his retinue killed thirty-nine tigers in ten days. But they were amateurs compared to Colonel Geoffrey Nightingale, who, prior to his sudden death while attempting to spear a panther from horseback, shot more than three hundred tigers in India’s former Hyderabad state. The Maharaja of Udaipur claimed to have shot “at least” a thousand tigers by 1959.
