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

by Dane Huckelbridge

A few pundits have even cast doubt on whether an adult tiger could survive on a diet of humans over such an extended period of time, as the Champawat appears to have done. But even with the rough numbers at hand, the math at least does seem to check out.

And if we accept that the Champawat Man-Eater was probably active for the 8 or 9 odd years Jim Corbett’s account would later suggest, then that would come out to roughly 52 kills a year over the period—resulting in a hypothetical total of between 416 and 468 human victims, a range that the purported total of 436 human victims falls easily into.

As recently as 1997, a 250-pound female tiger terrorized villages in the Baitadi District of Nepal, just a short drive north of the Champawat’s home turf. By the end of January of that year, the cat had already killed some 35 people; by July, that number had climbed to 50. And by November, it had added another 50 on top of that. In total, in a mere 10 months, this lone tiger was able to kill over 100 people before the government finally dispatched it.

Not long after that, a laborer named Ram Charan went to the edge of the woods to relieve himself, only to be snatched by the tiger and dragged away, screaming for his life. His friends heard his shouts for help and discovered him lying on the ground with the flesh stripped from his thighs—he died not long after.

And in both of these modern examples—the man-eater of Baitadi and the man-eater of Corbett National Park—the tigers began preying on humans for essentially the same reasons: loss of habitat, loss of prey, and injuries to their teeth or paws.

If a tiger can be captured alive, the Nepalese authorities try to do so, condemning the guilty man-eater to a life sentence at the Kathmandu zoo rather than an execution.

By carefully documenting and researching tiger attacks in Chitwan National Park over the course of several decades, he has essentially created an FBI-worthy profile of how wild, elusive tigers can transform under the right circumstances into serial killers.

66 percent were killed while within one kilometer of the forest’s edge, indicating that tigers were venturing out of the deep forest and hunting on the marginal zones around human settlements.

Attacks increased dramatically from an average of 1.2 persons killed per year between 1979 and 1998, to 7.2 killed per year between 1998 and 2006. This rise was due largely to dramatic growth in the human population in Chitwan, from virtually zero in 1973 when the park was established (the families who had lived there were forced to resettle elsewhere), to the nearly 223,260 people living within the park’s new, expanded buffer zone by 1999.

Sixty-one percent of the documented man-eaters occupied severely degraded habitats with low prey densities. Of the 18 problem tigers that researchers were able to examine, 10 had physical impairments like missing teeth or injured paws, with 90 percent of these impaired man-eaters also living in degraded habitats. And of the man-eating tigers that left the forest’s edge and ventured into villages—the sort of desperate behavior the Champawat too would eventually exhibit—virtually all came from degraded habitats, and all were physically impaired.

One of these ultra-aggressive tigers killed five people within a few minutes, and then sat beneath a tree for several hours where a sixth person was hiding, roaring and waiting for them to come down—not the sort of performance one would expect from a famously shy and elusive predator.

Attacks by man-eating tigers, though rare, are exceedingly traumatic, in almost every sense of the word. The death of a loved one is always challenging for families and communities, but it becomes far more so when that cherished individual has been mauled or even completely devoured by a striped, fanged, quarter-ton cat.

The tiger will generally use its ample claws to latch on to the prey around the flanks or shoulders, and then seek to kill it with a bite to the neck. On smaller prey, the tiger is more than capable of severing or damaging the spinal cord—its teeth are well designed to wedge between vertebrae and inflict catastrophic damage on the tender nerve tissue beneath, which it usually accomplishes quickly, and from the nape.

Humans generally fall into the first category, and when a tiger hunts our kind, it goes straight for the spine, although it will sometimes knock over the victim with a blow from its paws or the momentum of its body.

in the first milliseconds of a full-speed tiger attack, a human body must not only cope with a bone-fracturing impact comparable to that of a charging Spanish fighting bull, but also absorb fourteen simultaneous stiletto-deep stab wounds—four of which are usually inflicted on the back of the head or the nape of the neck. And that’s just the initial attack.

Oftentimes, victims of tiger attacks survive either because the tiger is scared away before it can finish the job, or because it is acting in a defensive manner and not a predatory one—in which case the attack is geared more toward deterrence than nutrition (although tigers have been known to eat victims even when the attack was defensive in nature).

The results can be far more gruesome when a man-eater is not scared away or interrupted before it has begun to feed. The tiger’s preferred method of feeding is to drag its fresh kill into a secluded part of the forest, feast on the meat until it can stomach no more, rest for a spell nearby, drink water, and then return to the carcass to continue feeding.

In a scenario that bears an unsettling resemblance to the aftermath of a suicide-vest bombing, it is often only the human head and extremities that remain, scattered about a welter of blood and shredded clothing where the tiger has been feeding.

in western Nepal and northern India, where both Hindu and Tharu funerary rites were closely observed, the lack of an intact body served as a spiritual sort of insult to injury, making the catastrophe that much more traumatic.

Man-eating leopards are more famous in India and Nepal for dragging victims from their houses, but tigers have been known to do it as well.

this tiger proved extremely difficult to find or catch, as it had a knack for concealing itself immediately after a kill in nearby ravines.

If the thought of a man-eating tiger bursting through wooden doors or mud walls to drag away a sleeping victim isn’t sobering enough, there are stories of Bengal tigers braving water and currents to carry off people from their boats.

tigers do not share the common house cat’s fear of water, and at times, they can even incorporate it into an attack strategy. The renowned filmmaker and tiger expert Valmik Thapar took note of how one tiger he observed in India’s Ranthambore tiger reserve had mastered the technique of chasing sambar deer into a lake, where, once they were hampered by the water, it would drag them under and kill them beneath the surface.

Jamal became something of a local legend in the Sundarbans, as he was perhaps the only person on earth who had survived three—yes, three—separate predatory attacks by tigers.

the village of Rupal is north—surprisingly north—of the prime tiger habitat of the deep terai. When one looks at the tiger reserves that exist in Nepal today—Chitwan, Bardia, Banke, Shuklaphanta—it is not a coincidence that they seem to cluster, like green beads on a string, along the tropical floodplain at the base of the Himalayas known locally as the terai.

Even in modern times, tigers still cling to the marshes and grasslands of the lowland terai rather than venturing into the colder and dryer hills.

In Shuklaphanta, tigers much preferred the marshy banks of the Mahakali River. Meanwhile, the dry hardwood forests of the bordering hills supported very low numbers of tigers, primarily because they also offered comparatively low levels of prey.

Rupal, however, where our tiger would first make a name for itself as a man-eater, is not in the lowland terai at all. It’s farther north, beyond the first Siwalik hills, in the beginning of the actual Mahabharat Lekh, or the Lesser Himalayas.

If we assume—and it does seem like a relatively safe assumption—that the Champawat’s origins lie in the prime Bengal tiger habitat farther south, in the lush lowland sal jungles of what is today the Shuklaphanta reserve, the obvious question arises: What drove it away from its birthplace, northward into the steep valleys and rugged foothills of the Himalayas, to kill humans on an unprecedented scale?

In answering the question of why a tiger would leave its natural habitat in the terai, it only makes sense to look at what was happening in the terai at that time. What becomes evident is that the long-standing dynamics between this ecosystem and the human beings who lived within it were undergoing seismic shifts in the late nineteenth century.

what history, taken with a healthy dose of analysis, reveals is that while the delicate threads that bound the terai, the Tharu, and the tigers may have unraveled almost completely in the twentieth century, they were already frayed long before—as early as the mid-nineteenth century, when the policies of the new Rana dynasty began to take hold.

The continental plate of India, which had been an isolated island since drifting away from Africa more than 100 million years before, slammed into the Eurasian Plate. “Slammed” in the geologic sense, as it was a slow-motion impact by human standards, occurring at a speed of less than fifteen centimeters per year.

From their snowcapped heights, these mountains would in turn beget three major rivers: the Indus, the Ganges, and the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra.

In what is today Nepal, in the Kathmandu Valley, archaeological evidence has been found that suggests human habitation in the region for at least eleven thousand years. The new Sanskrit-speaking Indo-Aryan arrivals lived right alongside preexisting populations, and in many cases mingled, creating a patchwork of ethnic groups interspersed throughout the range’s peaks and valleys.

In some instances, the Indo-Aryan groups who arrived in the Himalaya region—relative newcomers in the grand scheme of things—clung to geographies they were familiar with, while avoiding those that were beyond their ken. They effectively left such domains to the indigenous inhabitants who predated them, while still technically incorporating them into their burgeoning kingdoms.

In the foothills and mountains of the Himalayan range, a series of Hindu kingdoms arose, beginning with the Thakuri dynasty, who ruled parts of Nepal up until the twelfth century; the Malla dynasty, which held dominion until the eighteenth century; and the Shah dynasty, which unified a number of the regi...

One thing they did not do—at least very often—was leave the hills for the marshy grasslands and jungles below. This was the terai, the rich northern floodplain of the Ganges, a green belt of land that ran a verdant course along the southern base of the Himalayas.

Vast expanses of elephant grass—which can reach up to seven meters—covered wide swathes of the damp ground, and provided ample habitat for deer, rhinos, sloth bears, wild elephants, and of course, tigers.

As one might expect, the soil in this floodplain was exceedingly fertile, and with the proper irrigation systems could produce considerable yields of grains like rice and millet. Yet the Hindu Pahari people—who inhabited the hills and mountains above—were generally reluctant to visit the flatter, wetter lands below, for one convincing reason: the entire region was infested with malaria.

To go into the terai, particularly during the warmer monsoon months of the year, was considered a near–death sentence for the people of the Nepalese hills.

The presence of malarial mosquitoes throughout much of the year provided a natural deterrence against any sort of large-scale settlement.

While their Pahari neighbors clung to their dense villages and terraced fields in the mountains to the north, the Tharu lived in relative isolation in the jungles and grasslands of the terai belt below, with small communities strung all along its verdant length.

Many eventually adopted the Indo-European languages of their neighbors, and some, like the Rana Tharu of far western Nepal, even hesitate to label themselves Tharu at all, and insist instead that they are descended from an ancient Rajput king.

one thing the Tharu all share, from the Rana Tharu of the far west, to the Chitwania Tharu in the central region, to the Kochila Tharu of the east, is a common identity as a “people of the forest.”

The Tharu did create irrigation canals to yield better harvests from their fields. They did engage in a slash-and-burn system of grass husbandry to feed their animals, not least of which were the elephants they caught and domesticated. And they definitely did cut down trees for timber when needed, and clear space for fields in the forest when advantageous. But they did so with the knowledge firmly in place that the forest could serve as both a natural and a renewable resource.

The existing ecosystem of the terai provided a veritable cornucopia of materials and provisions necessary for survival—without it, they would have had no homes to live in, no fuel to cook with, no animals to raise, and practically nothing to eat.

the Tharu across the full range of the terai engaged in a sustainable form of short-fallow-shifting cultivation, growing rice, mustard, and lentils, and rotating crops to allow the soil to recover between plantings. Being seminomadic, most Tharus lived in low-impact mud and grass structures and stayed at a given habitation site for only a few years, ensuring that no single patch of forest would ever be over-farmed or over-hunted.

Needless to say, keeping this system of continual usage and renewal running smoothly was something of a balancing act, and for the Tharu, maintaining equilibrium wasn’t just about agricultural practices or labor strategies; it had its spiritual dimensions as well.

Rather than stone temples, the Tharu relied on shrines within the home containing important idols, as well as ceremonies held at specific forest locations called than, where the various animal spirits could be worshipped in the open, at the foot of a sacred tree.

The gurau was responsible for protecting his community from a number of potentially dangerous species, in particular the rhino, the elephant, the sloth bear, and the leopard.