Animals vs. Humans Theme Analysis

The traditional relationship between animals and humans is flipped in Saki’s short story “Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger,” where he describes the animals as tame and the humans as wild characters. Mostly set in colonial India, the narrative is centered on Mrs. Packletide’s undertaking to kill the titular tiger in order to outdo fellow socialite Loona Bimberton. Bimberton has recently completed a daring and exotic trip by airplane with an Algerian aviator, but Mrs. Packletide is quite certain her triumph in personally securing a tiger-skin will become the talk of town. Through his characterization of tame animals and unkind, even beastly, humans, Saki observes that British colonists and their beneficiaries were more dangerous than the predators they hunted.

Saki describes the animals in Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger as tame in order to undermine Mrs. Packletide’s illusion of her exotic big-game hunting. Tigers are often described as fearsome and majestic beasts in literature, but here the tiger is weak and pitiful. Saki explicitly details the titular tiger as an elderly, partially deaf, and perhaps unwell creature that requires plenty of sleep. Instead of hunting wild game, the tiger eats domestic animals such as goats that it can easily find in the village. The tiger is almost domesticated itself, as the village children confine it inside the village boundaries. When it sees a goat tethered as bait, the tiger lies down—not to cleverly disguise its approach, but because it is tired. These narrative details paint the tiger as feeble and tame rather than wild and exotic. The tiger’s tamed character is also signaled by the story’s title, which foreshadows Mrs. Packletide’s transaction of one thousand rupees for her ownership of tiger killing rights. Saki further details two other compliant animals that have died at human instruction—the pitiful, persistently bleating goat that Mrs. Packletide accidentally shoots instead of the tiger, and a “miserable rabbit” that British socialite Clovis imagines killing and wearing to a fancy-dress party. Together, all of these details underscore human cruelty—or at least indifference—toward the natural world.

In contrast to the animals, Saki characterizes the principal human characters in this story—British socialites Mrs. Packletide and Loona Bimberton and paid companion Louisa Mebbin—as disagreeable, selfish, and sometimes cruel individuals who are more beastly in behavior than the animals they seek to dominate. Saki likens Mrs. Packletide to a predator in numerous ways. Unlike the almost-tame tiger who tiredly lies down when it sees prey, Mrs. Packletide is a hunter described in active terms as she “crouched” and “awaited the coming of the quarry [the tiger].” Saki furthermore compares her to Nimrod, a biblical figure known for his skill as a hunter, and Diana, the classical Roman goddess of the hunt. Finally, a base or “animal” emotion wholly governs Mrs. Packletide’s behaviors: her jealousy of Loona Bimberton. Saki positions Loona Bimberton as a mirror image to Mrs. Packletide, as she is a similarly uncivilized character governed by animalistic selfishness and frivolity. She goes to great lengths to partake in exotic adventures—including a flight with an Algerian pilot—in order to ascend in social standing. Louisa Mebbin is the most animalistic of the women. Although a rational character, she is cruel in her conquest over Mrs. Packletide when she blackmails her into buying Mebbin a weekend cottage. Mebbin achieves this by ruthlessly threatening to reveal the truth of Mrs. Packletide’s false killing to London’s upper circles. The fact that Mebbin plants “tiger-lilies” at her new cottage and names it “Les Fauves,” translated as “The Wild Beasts” or “The Big Cats,” is a reminder of her triumph and an enduring statement of control over Mrs. Packletide. Louisa Mebbin therefore wounds other characters to a far greater extent than the feeble tiger.

In “Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger,” Saki flips the civilization versus savagery trope on its head when considering humans and animals. Audiences can easily recognize who is more dangerous—not the tiger as a traditionally lethal predator, but the human beings, specifically female socialites who exploit exotic environments for their own selfish ambitions.