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May 6 - May 6, 2025
Bengal tigers do not under normal circumstances kill or eat humans. They are by nature semi-nocturnal, deep-forest predators with a seemingly ingrained fear of all things bipedal; they are animals that will generally change direction at the first sign of a human rather than seek an aggressive confrontation.
the largest of any living felid (yes, saber-toothed tigers are excluded),
You don't have to exclude extinct felids when you specify it's for living cats
continues to prowl the boreal forests of the region in search of prey. 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.
to begin: 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. Royal Bengal tigers, the subset that lives in the sub-Himalayan jungle belt known as the terai, tend to be even bigger. One extraordinary specimen—reportedly also a man-eater, at least until David Hasinger shot it in 1967—weighed in at 857 pounds, measured over 11 feet long, and left paw prints “as large as dinner plates.”
Third: Bengal tigers are strong. 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.
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. They can drag a one-ton buffalo across a forest floor with ease, and are capable of carrying an adult chital deer by the neck as effortlessly as a mother cat does a kitten.
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. This intelligence, coupled with their innate athleticism and sizable frame, makes for one exceptionally effective natural predator.
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,
And then of course there is “Gustave,” a Nile crocodile from Burundi with a reported length of more than twenty feet, a hide pocked with bullet scars, and an apparent taste for human flesh. In addition to the wildebeest and hippopotamus that comprise its diet, it is said by locals to have eaten as many as three hundred people.
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.
tranquilizer guns are preferred to actual firearms whenever possible. 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. But in some cases, bullets do become a necessity,
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.
A hunting tiger is stealthy—it approaches its target crouched low to the ground on silent, padded feet, and it waits with twitching tail until the right moment to strike. When that instant arrives, the ambush is lightning fast, and usually conducted from the side or the rear. There is sometimes an accompanying roar
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.
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.
