In the key example of situational irony in the story, the tiger that Mrs. Packletide kills is not a ferocious beast that she outwits and overpowers, but a sick and tame animal who dies mostly due to old age and general weakness. The irony of Mrs. Packletide’s “hunt” comes across in the following passage, in which the narrator describes how the Indian villagers did a lot of Mrs. Packletide’s work for her:
The one great anxiety was lest he should die of old age before the date appointed for the memsahib’s shoot. Mothers carrying their babies home through the jungle after the day’s work in the fields hushed their singing lest they might curtail the restful sleep of the venerable herd-robber.
There are a couple layers of irony here. First is the irony of how Mrs. Packletide believes herself to be "hunting" a wild tiger when, really, the local villagers have trapped an old and feeble animal for her that they worry might “die of old age before the date appointed for the memsahib’s shoot.” (“Memsahib” was a Hindi term often used for white upper-class women at the time.) An additional layer of irony is the fact that the villagers are valiantly protecting this tiger only so that it can die in a few days—as the narrator describes, the villagers don’t want to "curtail" the tiger's "restful sleep."
While the upper-class English Mrs. Packletide believes herself to be superior to the Indian locals whom she bribes to help her catch the tiger, this moment makes it clear that the villagers are, in effect, outsmarting her by supplying her with a weak tiger, thereby ensuring that they will earn their monetary reward.
