Lions and Tigers in India

[Sully]

From the book "The Story of Asia's Lions"

"There was a curious debate during the british period, which continued long after independence, about which of the two great cats, the lion or the tiger, was stronger and whether the tiger "drove out" the lion and reduced it to its present minuscule domain. It is not clear how the debate started but it was for decades the subject of many a fireside chat, with even serious shikaris labouring over it.

From the evidence we have it is clear that the tiger was noticed by humans in the Indian subcontinent earlier than the lion. If this is a reflection of the commonness of a species at a particular period of history, then the inescapable conclusion is that the lion arrived and increased in numbers just before and in the early centuries of the common era. Whether it did so at the cost of tiger habitat and therefore tigers is moot, though such would appear to be the case. Equally important there are no records of any natural conflict between the two species. It would be strange if humans failed to record if it did happen.

The fact is that the two cats lived in different habitats. Even Kotah paintings show lions in thinner jungle than tigers. There is of course a possibility of an overlap in the range of the two species, the most preferred habitat of the one being the least preferred of the other. Skirmishes if any between the two would be rare and peripheral to the issue of one "driving out" the other.

While both cats are of near equal size and weight, lions are gregarious and they live in prides of varying sizes. To expect that a single tiger which is essentially a solitary animal, could succeed in annihilating a pair of lions, leave alone a pride of them, would be in the realm of imagination. 

We have seen that one could extrapolate the figure of say 1,500 lions living in India outside of Kathiawar in the early part of the 19th century as against a minimalist figure of 25,000 tigers around 1900. Tigers were reduced to less than 2,000 within the succeeding seventy years, a tiger's fate similar to that of the lion or the cheetah though later in coming. That causes of its decimation, as in the case of the lion or cheetah, were human interference with its life and its habitat. The large swathes of dense jungles where it lived were the last to be attacked by humans." Reply