Jim Corbett - Ethics of Tiger Hunting

At age 17, Jim Corbett took a job with the railroad as an inspector overseeing shipments across the Ganges River near Varanasi, some 430 miles to the southeast of his home in Uttarakhand, a position he would retain for 20 years. He took every chance he could get, however, to return to his boyhood stomping grounds in the Kumaon Hills, where his hunting and tracking abilities were renowned. Starting in 1906 he began to be petitioned by British authorities and local villagers alike to rid them of problem tigers.

The conscientious Corbett began to accept some of these requests, but only for tigers that had become habitual man-eaters, and even then he was selective. He refused to hunt a tiger that had only killed once, or even a handful of times. Though the common thought at the time was that a tiger would readily kill a human if given the chance, Jim knew that this was not the case, explaining that most of these cases were accidental an often involved a mother protecting her cubs.

Rather than taking the oft-expressed view that habitual man-eaters acted thus out of malice and hatred of men, he wrote "A man-eating tiger ...has been compelled, through stress of circumstances beyond its control, to adopt a diet that is alien to it...(usually due to) wounds...and old age.