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

by Dane Huckelbridge

To a Mughal king or a local maharaja, the idea of actually exterminating tigers would have been preposterous. To hunt tigers was their divine right, a sacred ritual of affirmation; to remove all the tigers from the Indian landscape would have imperiled their own identity.

To the British, however, the extermination of tigers became synonymous with progress, with “civilization.”

In just one short passage, the good captain essentially sums up the entirety of early British attitudes toward tigers, and toward India as a whole. He sees the forests and grasslands merely as places to be cleared and put to the plow, and the predators that inhabit them as actually “evil” in their unwillingness to be subjugated or easily removed. Colonialism in a nutshell.

Bullet wounds weren’t the only infirmity that could lead to man-eating—old age, worn-down teeth, and even porcupine quills occasionally turned otherwise normal tigers into man-eaters, and human–tiger conflict was not unheard of in British India.

when one considers their actual menace compared to other animals, it becomes obvious that the danger they posed was greatly exaggerated.

Poisonous snakes, for example, consistently killed twenty times as many people in India as tigers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many other “wild beasts” such as wolves, bears, leopards, and rhinos rivaled and regularly surpassed tigers in terms of yearly victims.