generation younger than Arseniev, but cut from similar cloth. In a letter to a close friend, Kaplanov wrote that, as a boy in European Russia, he had dreamed of hunting a tiger one day, but when he found his calling in the Far East, he realized that bloodless pursuit, though less exciting, would be of greater benefit to tigers and to science. This was an unusual way to be thinking in the 1930s, when tiger research consisted solely of what might best be described as “gunbarrel zoology.” With the exception of the pioneering wildlife photographer (and former tiger hunter) Frederick Champion,
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