"Popularly known as India's latter-day Jim Corbett and 'tiger man', 87-year-old Billy Arjan Singh is by any standards an extraordinary man. At Tiger Haven, his home in a magical spot on the edge of the jungle in UP, Billy's experiments with bringing up three orphaned leopards, and also Tara, a tiger cub which he imported from a zoo in England - shot him into both fame and controversy. His aim was to see if Tara's instincts would make her revert to the wild when she became mature. They did - and over the years she produced four litters of cubs, thus proving his contention that it is possible to supplement dwindling wild stocks with zoo-born animals. But when it was discovered that the tigress had Siberian genes in her ancestry, he was accused of having introduced a 'genetic cocktail' into the jungle." "Undeterred, Billy remained a champion of the forest and its denizens. It was almost entirely due to his advocacy that in 1973 the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, authorized the creation of the Dudhwa National Park. Now, in his eighties, comes recognition for his efforts: In March 2005 he received the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation award - a global honour administered by the World Wildlife Fund, that serves to recognize outstanding contributions in international conservation."--BOOK JACKET.

Detailed observation of Tara, the tiger, in the wild.

Tiger Haven is the story of the author's attempts to protect Indian wildlife in one small area of Uttar Pradesh, of his observations of the wildlife in his sanctuary, and of his own metamorphosis from sportsman and farmer to photographer and conservationist.

For many years historian and screenwriter Geoffrey C. Ward has been visiting the Indian jungles, drawn by their beauty and the mystery and power of the great endangered predator that has always ruled them--the tiger. In this intensely personal book, he combines history, biography and first-hand reporting to evoke the special appeal of India's forests and describes encounters with some of the 'tiger-wallahs' who have struggled against overwhelming odds to save the species from extinction. The remarkable tiger-wallahs covered here are Jim Corbett, the great destroyer of maneaters, who became a still greater conservationist; Billy Arjan Singh, the Spartan farmer who despises hunters and hunting, tried to return a tigress to the wild, and, all alone, carved out a national park; Fateh Singh Rathore, the uninhibited Rajput who cheerfully risked his life defending the jungles in his charge; and Valmik Thapar, the son of New Delhi intellectuals, who began as Fateh's disciple, became an authority in his own right, and now champions a new kind of conservation that may provide the tiger's only hope. An epilogue especially written for this edition brings the story of the tiger and its champions up to date. This evocative and well-illustrated book about a magnificent animal and its ablest defenders, one of the first to document the conflicts that plague efforts to save the species, will interest conservationists, ecologists and wildlife enthusiasts and appeal to a wide general readership.

The leopard is one of the most beautiful Great Cats in creation, and is now endangered in many countries. This fact led Arjan Singh, the celebrated Indian wildlife expert, to attempt a daring experiment: rear a leopard cub in his house and return it to the jungle. The story of how Arjan Singhtaught Prince and then the twins Juliette and Harriet the ways of the forest is enthralling from start to finish. Sharing his whole life with them, building them machans (tree platforms), walking the jungle tracks in their company, encouraging them to hunt, teaching them to disembowel their kills,he came to know the ways and character of the leopard as no man has before. His first great success came when Prince at last took to the jungle, fully re-habilitated.There were setbacks, it is true. Prince and Harriet each killed one human child, and the author's local critics were vociferous in their opposition. Yet Arjan Singh was supported by Mrs Indira Ghandi, then Prime Minister of India, and in 1976 he was awarded the World Wildlife Fund's Gold Medal forhis conservation work.Not only did the author succeed in returning a hand-reared predator to the forest, he also scotched the fallacy that leopards are treacherous and unpredictable. On the contrary, he demonstrated the 'essential tranquility' of the leopard's temperament, and showed that it is only the animal'sintelligence, combined with its capacity for effective retaliation when cornered which has given it a bad name. Although Arjan Singh achieved his aim, this inevitably meant the painful separation from these magnificent creatures he came to know and love so well.

Billy Arjan Singh is the only person in the world known to have hand-reared a tiger cub and returned it to the wild. This pictorial biography is a tribute to this enigmatic character who was one of the first people to put the spotlight on tiger conservation in India. It chronicles his controversial life and times, and tells the story of his pioneering experiments in bringing up leopard and tiger cubs, along with his pet dog, in harmony. The book is a timely publication following a year after Billy's demise on 1 January 2010. In a world dominated by lab-coat conservationists, his voice remains a disturbing reminder of the heartfelt and uncompromising conservation values, unblemished by realpolitik, that are forgotten today.

On the story of tigress rearing in the Tiger Haven.