The Tiger

by John Vaillant

Tigers, it must be said, have taken a ferocious toll on humans as well. In India, some legendary man-eaters killed and ate scores of people before being hunted down. A number of these cases have been documented by the famous tiger hunter and conservationist Jim Corbett. It would be impossible to accurately tally the tiger’s collective impact on humans through history, but one scholar estimated that tigers have killed approximately a million Asians over the last four hundred years. The majority of these deaths occurred in India, but heavy losses were suffered across East Asia. Throughout Korea, Manchuria, and southeast China, tigers were considered both sacred and a scourge. Until around 1930, tigers continued to pose such a risk that, in North Korea, the bulk of offerings made to some Buddhist shrines were prayers for protection from these animals. Nonetheless, tigers were held in high esteem in part because it was believed that they, too, made offerings to heaven. In the tigers’ case, these gifts took the form of the severed heads of their prey, a determination made, presumably, by the beheaded state of many tiger kills. Ordinary people were reluctant to retaliate against a predatory tiger for fear it would take offense, not to mention revenge, and so their day-to-day lives were shaped—and sometimes tyrannized—by efforts to at once avoid and propitiate these marauding gods.