The Tiger

by John Vaillant

one scholar estimated that tigers have killed approximately a million Asians over the last four hundred years.

“When the majority of people have no means of defense (i.e., firearms) tigers figure that out and include them on the list of potential prey,” he explained. “However, where you have a heavily armed populace (e.g., Russia) tigers also figure that out and ‘take people off the list.’ The implication is that you have to teach tigers that people are dangerous. I think this holds for most large carnivores.”

A cornucopia!

Bliss of killing without ever seeming to subtract from the tasty sum of infinity! But infinity is a man-made construct that has no relevance in the natural world.

nature, everything is finite, especially ...

order Carnivora (meat-eating mammals) represents approximately 10 percent...

Carnivora (meat-eating mammals) represents approximately 10 percent o...

only 2 percent of the total mamma...

Apex predators like big cats represent a tiny fraction of this already small percentage and, between 1860 and 1960, big g...

and, between 1860 and 1960, big game hunters made ...

December of 1911, the freshly crowned King George V went on an elephant-borne shikar to Nepal, during which he and his retinue ki...

King Ge...

killed thirty-nine tigers i...

Geoffrey Nigh...

shot more than three hundred tigers in India’s former...

Maharaja of Udaipur claimed to have shot “at least” ...

Maharaja of ...

“My total bag of Tige...

In Russia, at least as far back as the late nineteenth century, four men have been considered the minimum for a tiger hunting expedition. The same went for tiger catching, a seemingly lunatic enterprise, which fell out of favor only in the early 1990s. Tiger catchers, equipped with little more than hunting dogs, tree branches, and rope, would track down and capture live Amur tigers, usually for zoos and

tiger catching, a seemingly lunatic enterprise, which fell out of favor only in the early 1990s.

equipped with little more than hunting dogs, tree branches, and rope, would track down and capture live Amur tiger...

circuses. For obvious...

they preferred to go after cubs, but full-grown tigers have also been caught this way. Needless to say, these men were largely self-taught, and the learning curve would have been unforgiving in the extreme. Their courage inspired one tiger biologist to write, “No, the bogatyri [mythic Russian heroes] have not died out in Russia.” One of the last and most famous of the tiger ...

preferred to go after cubs, but full-grown tigers have also been caught this way. Needless to say, these men were largely self-taught, and the learning curve...

No, the bogatyri [mythic Russian heroes] have not die...

Kruglov, who learned the trade from an Old Believer named Averian Cherepanov.

Cherepanov’s method capitalized on one of the tiger’s greatest weaknesses: its low endurance at speed. A tiger can walk for days, but it can only run for short distances. For this reason, tiger catching was always done in the winter, preferably in deep snow, which shortened the chase dramatically. Once the dogs scented a tiger, they would be set loose to chase it until, too tired to run further, the animal would turn and fight. With the dogs holding the tiger at bay, the men would approach with long, forked tree branches and—somehow—pin the animal down. Then, in a quick and carefully choreographed operation, they would immobilize the tiger’s paws

tiger’s greatest weaknesses: its low endu...

tiger can walk for days, but it can only run for ...

For this reason, tiger catching was always done in the winter, preferably in deep snow, which shortened the chase dramatically. Once the dogs scented a tiger, they would be set loose to chase it until, too tired to run further, the animal would turn and fight. With the dogs holding the tiger at bay, the men would approach with long, forked tree branches and—somehow—pin the animal down. Then, in a quick and carefully ...

head, hog-tie it, and stuff it in a sack. This, of course, is easier said than done. Nonetheless, in 1978, Kruglov used the stick and rope method to—literally—bag a tigress weighing more than three hundred pounds. He is one of the only human beings in the history of the species to grab wild tigers by the ears repeatedly and live to tell about it. “I have never let anyone else handle the ears,” he explained to Dale Miquelle in 2001. “You know, the ears are her steering wheel. You can turn off her teeth with the ears.” Kruglov died in a freak accident in 2005. After surviving more than forty live tiger captures, not to mention the gauntlet of other hazards that take Russian men before their time, Kruglov was killed at the age of sixty-four when a tree fell on him. His legacy lives on in the form of the thirteen-thousand-acre Utyos Rehabilitation Center for Wild Animals in southern Khabarovsk Territory,...

in 1978, Kruglov used the stick and rope method to—literally—bag a tigress weighing more than three hundred pounds. He is one of the only human beings in the history of the species to grab wild tigers by the ears repeatedly and live to tell about it. “I have never let anyone else handle the ears,” he explained to Dale Miquelle in 2001...

Kruglov died in a freak accident in 2005. After surviving more than forty live tiger captures, not to mention the gauntlet of other hazards that take Russian men before their time, Kruglov was kil...

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, Kaplanov was the first person ever to write an account of tracking tigers with no intention of killing them once he found them.

Zapovednik (“forbidden zone”),

There is a famous quote: “You can’t understand Russia with your mind,”

A zapovednik is a wildlife refuge into which no one but guards and scientists are allowed—period.

This holistic approach to conservation has coexisted in the Russian scientific consciousness alongside more utilitarian views of nature since it was first imported from the West in the 1860s.

don’t just preserve the species, preserve the entire system in which the species occurs, and do so by sealing it off from human interference and allowing nature to do its work. It is, essentially, a federal policy of enforced non-management directly contradicting the communist notion that nature is an outmoded machine in need of a total overhaul.

Given the mood of the time, this was an almost treasonous line of thinking, and it is what makes this collaborative effort so remarkable: as dangerous as it was to be a tiger, it had become just as dangerous to be a Russian.

Russian citizens in the late 1930s were now being arrested and executed on a quota system. It was an absolutely terrifying time: Russia was Wonderland, Stalin was the Queen of Hearts, and anyone could be Alice.

At the height of the purges, roughly a thousand people were being murdered every day.

Some hard-line Marxists sincerely believed that plants and animals unable to prove their usefulness to mankind should simply be exterminated.

the tiger didn’t stand a chance. Falling squarely into the category of

“harmful fauna,” it had become a kind of fur-bearing E...

Lev Kaplanov’s landmark study, “The Tiger in the Sikhote-Alin,” was completed in 1941, and in it he recommended an immediate five-year moratorium on tiger hunting.§ That same year, Kaplanov’s colleague Yuri Salmin would go a step further: in a national magazine, he made an urgent plea for a total ban on tiger hunting in the Russian Far East. This was the first time in recorded history that anyone, anywhere, had made a public call for restraint with regard to the killing of these animals.

In 1947, Russia became the first

country in the world to recognize the tiger as a protected species.

In Primorye today one would be hard pressed to find an Amur tiger weighing more than five hundred pounds, but that is still a huge cat by any era’s measure. The tiger that killed Vladimir Markov was never weighed, but when he recalled it later, Trush’s number two, Sasha Lazurenko, said, “As long as I’ve worked here, I’ve never seen a tiger as big as that one.”

Men carry their superiority inside; animals outside.