ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris)

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Who was E. A. Smythies?
 
Some time ago, I get the idea to know who was this man and his reliability. This time, the easier source give excellent results, check this abstract:
 
“Evelyn Arthur Smythies, CIE (1885 – 1975), was a distinguished forester and philatelist, born of British parents in India. Smythies was an expert on the ecology of Uttarakhand and Nepal. His careful studies of the earliest postage stamps of India, Jammu and Kashmir, Nepal, and Canada produced groundbreaking handbooks on which philatelists rely, even today.
 
Smythies was educated at Clifton College, and received his degree in geology and a diploma in forestry from Oxford in 1908, then served in the Indian Forest Service from 1908 until 1940, based in Nainital. He was Chief Conservator of the Forest of Nepal from 1940 through 1947. Smythies' The Forest Wealth of India appeared in 1924. That same year, with C. G. Trevor he authored Practical Forestry Management.
 
Smythies and Jim Corbett proposed that an area around Ramnagar, Uttarakhand be made a "National Park" to protect the threatened tigers and other living things. These include the tiger, elephant, chital, sambar, nilgai, gharial, King Cobra, Indian muntjac, wild boar, hedgehog, common musk shrew, flying fox, Indian Pangolin, and nearly 600 species of birds. In 1936, the Hailey National Park came into being as India's first National Park. It was renamed the Ramganga National Park after India's Independence, but later it was renamed the Jim Corbett National Park in today's Uttarakhand.”
 
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._A._Smythies
 
As we can see, Smythies was by no means a simple “hunter”, he was in every sense of the word, a true “scientist” and in his time, this is the most reliable that you could get. We must take in count that in the old days, the weight of the “word” was way more important than in our days, where you can get pictures, videos and scans, no, in those days, your testimony and your reputation was the only thing that you could show as evidence. In the days of Smythies and far away, the word and the reputation was fundamental, and this man have it, after all, he was an expert on the ecology of north India and Nepal, studied in famous colleges in Britain and together with no other than Jim Corbett, they created the first national park from India, the Jim Corbett National Park!
 
This man, E. A. Smythies, is probably one of the most reliable sources about animals and ecology, so his reports and conclusions should be taken as serious as those other experts like Pocock, without diminishing the hunter records from Hewett and Cooch Behar. We must NOT make the same mistake than V. Mazák, I will talk about this latter.
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