Punjab was a hunting country. The princely states maintained shooting establishments, the British administration recorded game in the district gazetteers, and the bars and riverain held blackbuck, chinkara, nilgai, hog deer, wild boar, wolf, hyena, and until the nineteenth century lion and cheetah.
The lion held on in the country south of here into the nineteenth century and the last ones in this direction were shot in the 1830s and 1840s. The cheetah was kept and trained rather than hunted, and it went out along with the animals it had been used against.
Falconry was practised at the Mughal and Sikh courts and in the countryside, with the shikra and the saker, and the practice survives in Pakistan and in the Gulf rather than here.
Greyhound coursing of hares was a village sport across the Malwa and is now illegal and continues.
The Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 ended legal hunting. What ended the animals was the canal colonies and the plough, which removed the habitat, and that was finished before the law arrived.
Punjab is the most completely converted landscape in India and the game lists in its old gazetteers read like a description of somewhere else.
The shikari was a village occupation with its own knowledge of ground, tracks and season, and the communities that held it were among those listed as criminal tribes, which ended the trade twice over.
The princely states kept shikargahs, the reserved hunting woods, and the birs that survive as reserved forest today are what those preserves became.
Hunting was banned in 1972. What ended the game was not the shooting but the plough, and the ban arrived after the habitat had already gone.