Tom - Bernard Darwin used those terms in at least a couple of articles I know of, and he praises the ability of architects to design holes/courses that can make rabbits, at least sometimes, feel like like tigers. The first snippet makes that point; the second one is more in line with your question.
"It is today an accepted principle of golfing architecture that the tiger should be teased and trapped and tested, while the rabbit should be left in peace, since he can make his own hell for himself. Broadly speaking, it is an excellent principle, but I wonder, nevertheless, whether those who enunciate and act upon it do not sometimes a little misunderstand the rabbit's heart. Rabbits are tolerably sensitive animals. Do they not feel a little hurt that the architect thinks so meanly of their powers that he will put nothing in their way? [...]They must sometimes resent the implication that the attempt to trundle the ball in inglorious safety will give them more than all the trouble they want [...] Our architects are, of course, not only very skilled artists but very cunning persons, and they often contrive to make the rabbit believe that he is living more dangerously than in fact he is. There is one particular device employed to this end, though discretion forbids me to name particular courses. On one side of the green is a precipice full of bunkers, deep, cavernous and horrible; on the other side is a broad way of safety which coaxes the ball towards the flag. When we have played the hole successfully, we look shudderingly down upon those bunkers and think that there, but for the grace of heaven, we might have been. In our hearts we know that only a singularly atrocious stroke would have taken us there and that the bunkers are largely "eyewash"; but we cannot restrain a thrill of pride and pleasure. Easily as he is bamboozled, the rabbit, having played such a hole many times, comes to suspect that it is a simple one, and must long for something to surmount more genuinely perilous, more directly in his path. He welcomes now and again the possibility of swift and utter destruction, and likes to cry in his heart, even as he waggles, 'Victory or Westminster Abbey.' Better a nine with four niblick shots in it than a six all along the ground."
"The voice of the rabbit is heard in the land once more. He does not resemble the cuckoo. In June he does not change his tune. His mournful song is ever the same. The holes, he says, are too long and so are the carries; the courses are laid out by tigers for tigers. He has been recently saying it again in a number of letters to the press....Personally I have a great deal of sympathy
with these rabbits. As one who is sloping slowly, or perhaps not very slowly, towards their condition I agree that courses and holes are often made wearifully long. Because I sympathize with them I do not wish to emphasize too strongly the fact that some of their premises are doubtful and weak. They imply that it is only the good players who are the long drivers, but in fact there has arisen today a whole generation of golfers, all of whom can hit the ball a long way, yet many of whom are far from being good players.... They seem also to imply, in their demands that skill and accuracy should be rewarded, that these attributes go with short driving, but this is not so; the majority of short drivers have little skill, and their accuracy consists largely in being so short as to be unable to reach the rough. When all is said, however, I agree that many courses, at any rate when they are at full stretch, are not calculated to give anything like the maximum of pleasure to anything like the majority of golfers. If this be so, where does the remedy lie? Surely in the hands of the rabbits... [But] In the first place they are lazy in organizing revolt, and in the second a great many of them from motives, whether noble or ignoble, like to think that their course has a reputation for being long and hard, especially longer and harder than those of their immediate neighbors. However that may be, until they do organize revolt it is perhaps not unfair to suggest that they deserve to remain slaves. It is my private impression that a soviet of red rabbits would lay out a bad course, so bad that they would either share the fate of most revolutionaries and be quickly turned out, or else would be compelled to get a few mild scratch players of democratic tendencies to come and strengthen them. The sort of person who would lay them out a far better course than they would make for themselves would be a rather passé tiger brought up in the traditions of the elder Scottish courses."