No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Man-Eater in History

by Dane Huckelbridge

We do not know the year. Nor does history record the poacher’s name. But around the turn of the twentieth century, somewhere in the terai near the Kanchanpur District of western Nepal, a man made a terrible mistake. He attempted to kill a Bengal tiger.

a tiger hunt among the Tharu is a solemn affair, to be initiated with a puja sacrifice of roosters and goats, as a show of respect to the forest deity Ban Dhevi. It is an act of profound spiritual and earthly significance, one that risks angering gods and kings alike.

He does not see the tiger as a divine spirit, a lord of the forest, a custodian of the natural world, maintaining the balance of all things. To him, a tiger is a sack of gold and nothing more: money for clearing land, funds to buy a water buffalo and start a farm of his own.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the most prolific serial killer of human life the world has ever seen stalked the foothills of the Himalayas. A serial killer that was not merely content to kidnap victims at night and dismember their bodies, but also insisted on eating their flesh.

Far more than an apex predator that occasionally included humans in its diet, it was an animal that—for reasons that wouldn’t become apparent until its killing spree was over—explicitly regarded our species as a primary source of food.

In the end, its reported tally added up to 436 human souls—more, some believe, than any other individual killer, man or animal, before or since.

The events that transpired in the forests and valleys of the Himalayan foothills in the first decade of the twentieth century were not a series of bizarre aberrations. They were in fact the inevitable result of the tremendous cultural and ecological conflicts that were shaking the region—indeed, the world—at that time, affecting man and animal alike in unlikely ways, and throwing age-old systems chaotically out of whack.

This tiger ceased to behave like a tiger at all, in important respects, and transformed into a new kind of creature all but unknown in the hills of northern India’s Kumaon district, prowling around villages and stalking men and women in broad daylight.

Jim Corbett was a prolific sportsman who, upon achieving fame, hobnobbed with aristocrats and used tiger hunts to curry their favor. But he was also a tireless advocate for wild tigers and devoted the latter part of his life to their conservation—as evidenced by the sprawling and magnificent national park in India that bears his name to this day.

Yet it is colonialism, undeniably, and the onslaught of environmental destruction that it almost universally heralds, that served as the primary catalyst in the creation of our man-eater.

It may have been a poacher’s bullet in Nepal that first turned the Champawat Tiger upon our kind, but it was a full century of disastrous ecological mismanagement in the Indian subcontinent that drove it out of the wild forests and grasslands it should have called home, and allowed it to become the prodigious killer that it was. What becomes clear upon closer historical examination is that the Champawat was not an incident of nature gone awry—it was in fact a man-made disaster.

any tiger wallah could tell you the various factors that can turn a normal tiger into a man-eater: a disabling wound or infirmity, a loss of prey species, or a degradation of natural habitat. In the case of the Champawat, however, we find not j...

the British in the United Provinces of northern India and their Rana dynasty counterparts in western Nepal had created, through a combination of irresponsible forestry tactics, agricultural policies, and hunting prac...

This is a fact corroborated time and time again by biologists, park rangers, and hunters alike, all of whom can attest firsthand to just how shy and elusive wild tigers actually are. One can spend a lifetime in tiger country without ever laying eyes upon an actual tiger, with the occasional pugmark or ungulate skull the only hint at their phantomlike presence.

With hunting, mating, and fending off territorial rivals taking up most of its time, the normal tiger has more important things to worry about; we barely rate a passing glance. We are a nuisance to be avoided, and nothing more.

When a mother tiger is surprised in a forest, or when a wounded tiger is cornered by a hunter, its instincts for self-preservation kick in and the claws come out. This tiger will often roar, come bounding in a series of terrifyingly fast leaps, and commence beating its human target head-on with its front paws, with enough power in most cases to smash the skull after the first strike or two.

This is strictly a combative behavior, the inverse of predation (although defensive attacks do sometimes result in consumption as well). It manifests itself when the tiger senses imminent danger, and for that reason, calls upon its considerable resources to save its own skin—figuratively, and, given the price a tiger pelt can fetch on most black markets, literally as well.

With astounding speed and athleticism, the roaring tiger materializes from the high grass as if out of nowhere, leaps over the elephant’s head with claws at the ready, and with merely a single glancing blow, manages to shred the poor elephant driver’s left hand to bloody ribbons before making its getaway.

Two of the Bengal tiger’s preferred prey species—the sambar deer and the gaur bison—can weigh as much as a thousand pounds and three thousand pounds, respectively, which gives some idea of why the tiger’s oversized set of fangs are so crucial to its survival.

To crush the muscle-bound throat of a one-ton wild forest buffalo is no easy task, but it is one for which the tiger is purpose-made.

The tiger’s evolutionary history, however, begins not with a saber-toothed gargantuan eviscerating lumbering mastodons, but with a diminutive weasel-like creature scampering among the tree branches.

Initially, there were three subgroups of felids: those that could be categorized as Pantherinae, Felinae, and Machairodontinae, with the third, although today extinct, including saber-toothed Smilodons that were indeed capable of ripping the guts out of woolly mammoths, thanks to their foot-long fangs and thousand-pound bodies.

Unlike leopards and lions, which both came to Asia via Africa (there are still leopards in India today, as well as lions, although only very small populations survive in the forests of Gir National Park), tigers are truly Asian in origin, first appearing some 2 million years ago in what is today Siberia and northern China.

The Bali tiger, the Javan tiger, and the Caspian tiger all went extinct in the twentieth century, due to the usual culprits of habitat destruction and over-hunting. The first vanished from the face of the earth in the early nineteen hundreds, although the latter two subspecies seemed to have hung on at least until the 1970s. The extermination of the Caspian tiger is especially unsettling given the sheer size of its range—the large cats once roamed from the mountains of Iran and Turkey all the way east to Russia and China.

This usually means boar and deer, although at least one radio-collared tiger studied by the Wildlife Conservation Society, or WCS, was recorded as feasting primarily on bears.

It seems the Amur not only has a preferred method of killing bears, involving a yank to the chin accompanied by a bite to the spine, but that it is also somewhat finicky, preferring to dine on the fatty parts of the bear’s hams and groin.

All of their populations are atrociously small, with the South China tiger bearing the ignominious distinction of being categorized, at least recently, as one of the ten most endangered animals in the world, and quite possibly extinct in the wild.

Bengal tigers are big. While females tend to max out close to 400 pounds, adult males regularly achieve body weights in excess of 500 pounds, and some exceptionally large individuals have been documented at weights of over 700 pounds.

Second: Bengal tigers are fast. In short sprints, they can achieve forty miles per hour, which is almost three times as fast as the average human being, and roughly equivalent to the top speed of a Thoroughbred racehorse.

In an incident recorded in Nepal in 1974, a startled tigress protecting her cubs had little trouble mauling a researcher hiding fifteen feet above her in a tree.

One officer fired three .40-caliber-pistol rounds into the charging cat’s head and chest, and that only seemed to anger it further. It wasn’t until a second officer put a fourth bullet in the tiger’s skull at point-blank range that it finally ceased its attack and fell to the ground.

A tiger in its natural habitat—alert, attuned, muscles rippling beneath its tawny striped hide—is another creature entirely from the languid, yawning pets of Siegfried & Roy. As lethal as this urbanized West Coast zoo tiger proved to be, it was a flabby house cat compared to its country cousins, ripping apart wolves and chasing down bears in ancient forests across the sea.

A tiger’s jaw is capable of exerting around a thousand pounds of pressure per square inch—the strongest bite of any cat. That’s four times as powerful as the bite of the most menacing pit bull, and considerably stronger than that of a great white shark.

A single blow from a Bengal tiger’s paw can crack the skull and break the neck of an Indian bison, and can decapitate a human.

Aggressive tigers have been known to rip the bumpers off cars, tear outhouses to splinters, and burst through the walls of houses in search of food.

Predation of almost any kind requires intelligence—a carnivore must discern what prey is ideal, where to find it, and how best to stalk it while evading detection. Tigers excel at all of the above, thanks to skills acquired during a lengthy tutelage with their mothers. Cubs typically stay with their mothers as long as two and a half years, during which, under her ceaseless care, they learn the many, complicated tricks of the trade.

In colder climes to the north and east, there exist tales of tigers imitating the calls of black bears, ostensibly so they could snap their spines and dine on their fat-rich meat. Tigers frequently adjust their attack strategies to fit their quarry, and whether it’s chasing larger animals into deep water where they are easier to kill, snapping the leg tendons of wild buffalo to bring them down to the ground, or flipping porcupines onto their bellies to avoid their sharp quills, tigers are quick studies in the arts of outsmarting their prey.

In addition to bears and wolves, tigers have been documented ripping 15-foot crocodiles to pieces, tearing the heads off 20-foot pythons, and dragging 300-pound harbor seals out of the ocean surf to bludgeon on the beach.

Bengal tigers in northern India are known to have killed and eaten both rhinos and elephants, and while they tend to prefer juveniles for obvious reasons, full-grown specimens of both species have been victims of tiger predation.

For whatever reasons, though, Panthera tigris does not normally consider us to be edible prey. As we know, they go out of their way to avoid interacting with our kind. But as many a tiger expert has noted, what tigers normally do, and what they’re capable of doing, are two very different things.

Residing in small villages composed of mud-walled, grass-thatched structures, and combining low-impact agriculture with hunting and gathering, the Tharu are experts not just at surviving but thriving in a wilderness where few others can.

even in the present day, documenting tiger attacks in the remote frontier of western Nepal is difficult at best—many attacks go unreported, and problem tigers only gain recognition in the press when they’ve claimed unusually large numbers of victims.

A man-eater, unlike a sport tiger, was greeted with relative indifference, and official “documentation” would have consisted simply of a tiger skin gifted to the village shikari who killed it.

Essentially, to the Nepalese government, man-eating tigers were the Tharu’s problem—not theirs. Rather than send in hunters, they preferred to let the locals handle it.

Predation upon man, conducted by a tiger, was almost cosmically aberrant to the Tharu people, whose syncretic belief system represented a melding of both Hindu and older animistic beliefs. Such attacks represented the unintended overlap of two separate spiritual spheres, in the unholiest of fashions.

since tiger victims were often totally devoured, the essential and extremely complex Tharu funeral rites of cremation and riverine release became difficult to perform, ensuring further spiritual calamity enacted by the bhut.

In the Sundarbans of West Bengal, however, where village men still go into the forest to fish and collect honey, and where tiger predation is still a daily threat, the stigma against tiger victims is very much alive and relevant. Many locals refuse to even speak of tigers or utter their name, as they believe words alone are enough to summon snarls and stripes from the mangrove forests.

“Tiger-widows,” as they’re unceremoniously known, can be considered unholy or tainted, and at times face abuse from in-laws as well as general ostracism in the community. They are frequently treated as a source of bad luck and forced to live in isolation, where they can wear only white saris and must eschew all forms of decoration, including jewelry or bangles.

The tiger is alleged to have claimed 200 victims in Nepal, and then later another 236 victims once it crossed into India. That’s 436 human lives taken by a single animal. To put that grisly number into contemporary perspective, the entire roster of the National Basketball Association evens out at around 450 players.

In 1898, a pair of lions known as the Tsavo Man-Eaters temporarily put a massive British railway project in Kenya on hold when they began pulling workers from their tents at night. Accounts vary as to the total number of victims, with some going as high as 135, although scientific tests conducted by the Chicago Field Museum, which has the taxidermied lions on display, has indicated that they probably didn’t actually consume more than thirty-five of their victims.