Sunday, October 15, 2023
George V's Bengal tiger, 1911
Unsettling to view this stuffed Bengal Tiger at the 
Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, which was shot by King George V in 1911 on a visit to Nepal. It was just one of 39 tigers which were killed in the shooting spree, at a time (as the Museum notes point out) 'when tigers were demonised as bloodthirsty animals' and killing them 'was presented as a glorious, necessary practice'. The animals and their skins were distributed to regional museums in the years which followed, ostensibly to give children the opportunity to see these exotic and fearsome creatures. George V seems to have revelled in shooting animals, of all sorts; in a Guardian article of 2007, Stephen Bates comments: 'George V, who was really trigger happy, once kill{ed} 1,000 pheasants in a day'.
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