d for the destruction of each fully grown wild dog.
Colonel Peyton alludes to the native idea that these dogs attack and kill
tigers, but says that no instance of their having killed a tiger is known.
At the same time it is, he says, a fact that the tiger will give up his
kill to wild dogs, and will leave a place in which they are present in
large numbers. Some years ago I beat a jungle in which a tiger had killed
a bullock, and in which another tiger had on a former occasion lain up,
but the tiger was not there, and a number of jungle dogs were beaten out.
We afterwards found the tiger in a jungle about a mile away, and he had
evidently abandoned his kill, for no other reason, apparently, than
because of the presence of the dogs. An old Indian sportsman tells me of a
very widespread native tradition as to the action of these dogs previous
to attacking a tiger. Their belief is that the dogs first of all micturate
on each others' bushy tails, and, when rushing past the tiger, whisk their
tails into his eyes and thus blind him with, the objectionable fluid,
after which they can attack him with comparative impunity. A forest
officer informs me that the Gonds have a somewhat similar tradition, and
that they believe that the dogs first of all micturate on the ground
around the tiger, and that the effluvium has the effect of blinding
him.[23] The late Mr. Sanderson, in his "Thirteen Years amongst the Wild
Beasts of India," mentions an instance reported to him by the natives of
their finding a tiger sitting up with his back to a bamboo bush, so that
nothing could pass behind him, while the wild dogs were walking up and
down and passing quite close to him, evidently with the view of annoying
the tiger, and the position then taken up by the tiger seemed to show that
he was apprehensive of an attack. From his experience of the great power
of the wild dog, Mr. Sanderson entertained no doubt that they could kill a
tiger, though he knows of no instance of their having done so. The old
Indian sportsman above alluded to told me of a case where a tiger had been
marked down by native shikaris, and where they afterwards found wild dogs
eating the carcase of the tiger, which they had presumably killed, but I
cannot find any account of the dogs having been seen in the act of killing
a tiger, though I can easily conceive that a hungry tiger, and an equally
hungry pack of wild dogs may have come into collision over a newly killed
animal, and th