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

by Dane Huckelbridge

In France, for example, between the years 1764 and 1767, a wolf—or possibly a wolf–dog hybrid—known as the Beast of Gévaudan reputedly killed some 113 people before Jean Chastel, a local hunter, finally shot it and ended its spree.

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.

As the research shows, the most problematic tigers—those with degraded habitats, physical impairments, and aggressive dispositions—seem to lose their fear of people altogether, and this is precisely what happened in the case of the Champawat.

There is sometimes an accompanying roar coincident with the initial strike—and at 114 decibels, roughly twenty-five times louder than a gas-powered lawn mower, what a roar it is.

Being able to live in harmony with the tiger—even gain mastery of the tiger—represents the ultimate form of spiritual ability, because the tiger was and still is regarded as the ultimate expression of the forest’s awesome power.

To the Tharu, the tiger was never a monster to be exterminated, but a force of nature to be harnessed and understood. The truly great man was not he who could kill a tiger, but rather he who could make peace with it, and good use of its fangs and its claws. He who could channel that power, as it were, into something constructive.

Obviously, tigers weren’t harmless—they were apex predators, after all, endowed with awesome strength and terrific abilities. And humans were, at the end of the day, edible meat. But when one considers their actual menace compared to other animals, it becomes obvious that the danger they posed was greatly exaggerated. The annual government gazettes from the period clearly show that other animals presented a significantly greater threat to humans than tigers. 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.

Many rural communities did have their own methods for dealing with tigers—after all, they had been living alongside them for hundreds if not thousands of years. In 1815, for example, a judge in Madras reported how seven hundred villagers “formed a Circle round [a] Tyger” that had been terrorizing their lands and finished it off with spears. There are similar accounts of villages banding together to use nets and even poisoned arrows to get rid of problematic tigers—something the British, who generally lived in cities and bungalows far removed from any actual threat of tiger predation, had the audacity to critique as unsporting. Apparently they saw more valor in butchering tigers at scale, using high-powered rifles from an elephant’s back.

And even when tigers did not directly retaliate against trigger-happy hunters, they sometimes got their “revenge” at a later date. Wounded, bullet-riddled tigers became relatively commonplace in the frigid taiga forests of the Russian Far East, and unable to hunt their natural prey, they turned their attentions toward the slow-footed creatures who had injured them in the first place.

The grasslands where chital deer thrived were being put to the plow; the forests where sambar and gaur made their home were being logged at an unprecedented rate and drained of their biodiversity; the local people, who had lived sustainably alongside these places for millennia, were suddenly deprived of much of their livelihood and forced to sneak into the forest at night like bandits, stealing animal fodder and poaching game. Of course something was bound to give, not just with tigers, but with predators in general. And indeed, it did.

A government report from the United Provinces covering wild animals in 1907 and 1908 attributed a drastic increase in predatory leopard attacks in Almora to “wholesale destruction of game such as sambhar, gural and kakar,” all of which resulted in “a serious diminution of the natural food supply of tigers and leopards.” Similarly, a sudden rise in wolf attacks recorded in nearby Allahabad in 1906—a local pack carried off eighty-six children that year, compared to nineteen the previous one—was attributed to “the growing scarcity of game in the district and to the consequent laps into bad habits of individual wolves.” And according to that same report, the total number of fatal tiger attacks in Kumaon—just those that were recorded by the government, mind you, for there were surely many more—jumped by 500 percent in that year alone.

Why would a colonial government bent on populating a sparsely inhabited region and pushing economic productivity through the roof care about the delicate balance among tigers, wild ungulates, and forest-dwelling locals, when all of the above could be wiped off the face of the earth and replaced with field after field of cultivable and taxable land?

“The Wolf of Ederachillis,” published in 1860: On Ederachillis’ shore The grey wolf lies in wait,— Woe to the broken door, Woe to the loosened gate, And the groping wretch whom sleety fogs On the trackless moor belate. The lean and hungry wolf, With his fangs so sharp and white, His starveling body pinched By the frost of a northern night, And his pitiless eyes that scare the dark With their green and threatening light. He climeth the guarding dyke, He leapeth the hurdle bars, He steals the sheep from the pen, And the fish from the boat-house spars; And he digs the dead from out of the sod, And gnaws them under the stars. Thus every grave we dug The hungry wolf uptore, And every morn the sod Was strewn with bones and gore; Our mother earth had denied us rest On Ederachillis’ shore.

Colonial officers of the early 1800s may have observed Indian villages banding together to drive away the occasional man-eater with spears, nets, and poisoned arrows, but such a thing would have been impossible by the advent of the twentieth century. Weapons had long since been outlawed, and much of the shared cultural knowledge of how to defeat man-eaters had been lost as well. If rural Indian populations had become helpless in the face of apex predators, it was largely because colonial policy had rendered them as such.

Tigers are nothing if not efficient, the product of millions of years of refinement. Efficient in how they hunt, efficient in how they kill, and efficient in how they feed. There is no malice or cruelty in what they do, any more than there is malice and cruelty in how a cow eats grass.

As of the writing of this book, estimates put the population of wild tigers across all of Asia at close to four thousand. It is a precarious number, and the species is still gravely threatened. A growing luxury market in China with a demand for tiger skins and other body parts, further aggravated by the highly controversial practice of captive tiger farming, has taken its toll in neighboring countries, encouraging poaching in Russia, India, and Nepal—in fact, tiger poaching in Indian forests for 2016 surged to its highest level in fifteen years. And in places where poaching is not a primary culprit, simple habitat destruction proves just as deadly. Since 2010, encroaching farmland has caused tigers to all but vanish in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, and the rise of palm oil plantations in Sumatra has pushed the subspecies of tigers there to the brink of extinction—something that has already happened in the nearby islands of Java, Bali, and Singapore.

That when it comes to truly behaving as a beast—to killing wantonly and without reason—it is our kind, not theirs, that is the fiercer of the two.