A New Zealand group canceled a cat-hunting competition for kids after receiving massive backlash for the plan, but one Kiwi journalist told a national audience he thinks the cat hunt is a great idea and doesn’t go far enough.
“When it comes to feeral kets, I’m on the soide of the kea, the kākāpō and the kiwi ivery sangle doy of the week and my missige to [the organizers] is ‘Git the competition back on, git the keds back out thea,'” said the vowel-desecrating morning show host Patrick Gower. “If thea gonna hunt and thea’s feeral kets in the way, then we hif to woipe them out. Feeral kets need to be shot, they need to be run ovah, they need to be trepped, they need to be woiped off the foice of Aotearoa and I imploah the school to git it back on, and look, I’ll put up some rewoade as well foah any kets these kids git down theah as well.”
English translation: “I think the cat-killing contest is a wonderful idea, cats need to be shot, run over and exterminated from New Zealand, and I hate cats so much that I’ll put up some of my own money as prizes for the children who bag the most kills.”
You’ve got to wonder what cats have done to Patrick Gower for him to hate them so much, and fortunately dear readers, PITB has the answer!
Gower lost the New Zealander of the Year competition of 2020 to a cute orange tabby named Mittens.
Think about that: All those years of doing Pulitzer-worthy breakfast show kitchen demonstrations, of slaving away at the anchor desk bringing viewers important news about reality TV stars and parroting former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s declaration that New Zealand’s government is “the single source of truth” on COVID, and Gower loses the honor to a damn cat. Mittens even has the key to the City of Wellington, and Gower does not.
So sad.
Mittens receiving honors that have eluded morning show host Patrick Gower. Credit: Wellington City Council
It’s unfortunate when a man in influential position, small country or not, enthusiastically encourages children to practice being future serial killers by slaughtering innocent animals because he thinks — despite the complete absence of evidence — that arbitrarily gunning down and running over sentient animals will save birds.
Really, you’d think before calling for the extirpation of an entire species of animal that these people would have something, even a single bogus research study, claiming that bird populations would recover if only people started killing cats on sight.
But no such proof exists, and the burden of proof rests with Gower, fellow Kiwi cat-hater Gareth Morgan and others who harbor an irrational and ill-advised hatred of tiny animals who are simply behaving the way nature designed them to behave.
What we do know is that managing cat populations can be done, but it’s difficult, time-consuming work that requires dedication and patience.
Cities like Washington, D.C., with its exhaustive cat count, and communities across the US have provided the blueprint with TNR efforts and a mass push for all pet owners to spay and neuter their cats. The results have been remarkable, and shelters save more than a million felines a year compared to just a decade ago. There’s still work to be done to bring the number of euthanizations down to zero.
Gower
It’s also worth noting that the organizers of the North Canterbury Hunting Competition and supporters like Gower are coming from a place of ignorance. In their original, now-deleted announcement, the organizers offered a “guide” to telling the difference between feral and pet cats, unaware that they are the same species. The only difference is that pet cats are fortunate enough to have homes, and strays and ferals do not.
The group said it was offering its “guide” as a way to prevent children from killing pet cats, but how exactly would they do that when a pet is indistinguishable from a colony stray or a feral? Would they find a microchip on the corpse of a cat they killed and say “Oops, guess that one doesn’t count!”?
Does a cat somehow feel less if it doesn’t have a home? Is its life worth less if it doesn’t have a collar and eat from a bowl?
It’s barbaric and so poorly thought-out, it really boggles the mind that the idea of a cat-killing competition for kids was voiced, let alone approved, planned and promoted by supposed adults.
As for the contest itself, we’re very glad it’s been called off, even if the organizers want to play victim and say their feelings have been hurt by the response to their murderous event.
That, however, doesn’t solve the problem. The fact that the organizers thought this was a good idea in the first place, and the increasingly pitched rhetoric from the likes of Gower and Morgan, are normalizing the idea of slaughtering innocent animals who have their own minds, thoughts and feelings, and who have been shaped by 10,000 years of history to live with and depend on humans.
Instead of calling for blood and whipping people into a frenzy, influential New Zealanders should read about cats and animal cognition in general, so they’re aware that felines experience the full range of primary and secondary emotions and are very much capable of suffering the same way we do when we’re injured, stressed and our lives are in danger.
That, unlike claims that cats are primarily responsible for the decline in bird populations, is hard scientific fact. We can peer into the brains of felines, watch their neurons fire, see different brain regions light up as they think specific thoughts and respond to specific smells and sights.
Maybe if people who hate cats understand what they are, they’ll feel some empathy for a beautiful species, animals who have been companions and literal life savers to humans since before deepest antiquity, animals whose lives have intrinsic value regardless of what they mean to us. At the very least, we owe them that.
An annual hunting competition for children in New Zealand has a new category this year, awarding a cash prize to the young hunter who kills the most cats.
You read that right.
The North Canterbury Hunting Competition announced the new category on Saturday and says it will offer a $250 prize to any child 14 or younger who kills the most felines.
In a statement, the local SPCA pointed out the obvious, that cats will suffer horribly, pets will die and the competition will result in bungled kills en masse, leaving wounded cats to suffer horribly before the children finish them off — if indeed they do.
“There is a good chance someone’s pet may be killed during this event,” the Canterbury SPCA wrote in a statement. “In addition, children often use air rifles in these sorts of events which increase the likelihood of pain and distress, and can cause a prolonged death.”
Credit: Ali Arapou011/pexels
Prompted by the same sloppy “research studies” that inspired Australia to kill millions of cats — and resulted in a mouse plague of biblical proportions in 2021 and 2022, causing billions of dollars in damage to farms, homes, businesses and infrastructure — New Zealand is on a disinformation-fueled jihad against felines.
Like all such studies, the claims that cats are singlehandedly responsible for declines in native wildlife, thus absolving direct human activities of blame, come by way of overzealous bird conservationists and others who insist the mass murder of cats will save native birds and small mammals. As if humans destroying habitats, dumping chemical waste, creating wind farms that act as bird dicers, building glass skyscrapers that millions of birds fly into every year, saturating entire swathes of the Earth with light pollution and EM radiation that harms and confuses animals — and all the other things people do — have no impact whatsoever, and it’s only those dastardly cats who are the culprits.
You’ve got to hand it to the misguided conservationists, who have picked tiny scapegoats who can’t defend themselves verbally or physically against humans.
To understand how the “hunting” (killing) competition can be real, it’s important to understand the context of the way cats are portrayed in New Zealand. Gareth Morgan, a Kiwi economist and politician, launched a campaign about a decade ago with the stated goal of eradicating cats from the island nation of 5.1 million people, which would forbid people from adopting new cats and end programs like trap, neuter, return (TNR) in favor of having local animal control departments kill felines.
Morgan, whose Cats to Go site portrays kitties with devil horns and glowing red eyes, says cats are evil animals driven by “bloodlust.”
“Cats are the only true sadists of the animal world, serial killers who torture without mercy,” Morgan has said.
A screenshot from the group’s Facebook page announcing a new prize for young hunters.
The North Canterbury Hunting Competition, which also offers prizes like dirt bikes for child hunters, pulled the new category announcement from its Facebook page on Monday but stopped short of canceling the event, blaming people who were upset by the idea of cat hunting.
Citing abusive feedback, the group said it’s “incredibly disappointed by this reaction” and said the hunt is for a good cause, raising money for local projects.
The northern Indian state of Uttarakhand was known for its ancient Hindu temples, the ruins of a once-mighty kingdom called Kumaon, and sprawling wilderness dotted with villages mostly inhabited by farmers and craftsmen living in the shadows of the Himalaya mountains.
But when Jim Corbett arrived in 1907, it was a ghost state.
Doors were closed, windows were shuttered, village greens were abandoned. The fields lay dormant, their crops unharvested and ripening on the vine as farmers refused to leave their homes. When people had to venture out for fire wood they did so only in armed groups, with dozens of adult men wielding blades and repurposed farming tools, making a ruckus as they set out.
No one dared go out at night. Travel between villages had become rare, and if necessity forced people to travel, they did so in the heat of the mid day and only in numbers resembling small armies.
It wasn’t war, disease or superstition that kept the people of Kumaon huddled in their homes, terrified to step out.
It was a tiger.
The Katarmal Sun Temple in Kumaon. The area is known for its temples and religious sites. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
A map from 1857 showing Kumaon, highlighted in purple, on India’s border with Nepal.
Kumaon sits in the shadow of the Himalayas, with the Sharda River serving as its border with Nepal. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Or a tigress, as Jim Corbett found when he set eyes on the first pug marks — paw prints — left by the notorious man-eater.
The paw pads of male tigers are ovular with distinctive gaps between the toes, while the impressions left by females are more compact, with toe pads that leave unmistakable teardrop shapes in mud and dirt. The pug marks revealed it was massive adult female Bengal. Corbett suspected it was the same tigress who had terrorized the people of Nepal from the late 1890s until 1903, killing hundreds before the Nepalese army was called in.
Not even the soldiers managed to stop her, and when the tiger’s death toll topped 200 and local leaders were running out of options, the army organized a massive beat — essentially a wall of people wielding torches and guns, advancing in unison — to drive the tigress out of her territory, over the River Sharda and deep into neighboring India.
They hoped the tigress would become someone else’s problem — and she did, continuing her reign of terror for four more years in Kumaon, bringing life in the region to a standstill.
Credit: Wild Trails
Credit: Wild Trails
The tigress was ruthless and efficient, striking farmers working the edges of fields, children sent to fetch wood, fishermen sitting by streams. She seemed to have lost her fear of man completely, hunting in broad daylight and picking her victims off regardless of whether they were alone or surrounded by others.
The local villages dispatched hunters who went after the tiger and never returned. Pooling their money — no small feat in a poor, rural state of India — they hired professionals who set out and weren’t heard from again. One party comprised of a dozen seasoned hunters armed with rifles tried challenging the tigress on her own turf, entering the jungle and using a fresh animal carcass to draw her out.
The tigress was cunning. She knew human hunting parties were after her, and she changed her behavior in response. Although the town of Champawat remained the center of her new territory, she widened it considerably and ranged great distances in between kills.
Instead of terrorizing one area, now she was stalking a wide swath of greater Uttarakhand. She’d appear on the outskirts of a village one day, killing a housewife out collecting herbs and firewood, then pop up 20 miles away by the next sunrise, striking as opportunity presented itself.
But the Demon of Champawat, as she came to be known, wasn’t the only tiger in the region. Many people who’d seen her didn’t live to provide a description, so she became the shadow at the edge of the forest, the monster lurking in the grass.
Every time villagers heard a tiger’s roar echo from the jungle, they dropped their tools and ran for the safety of their homes. Every roar became the roar of the Champawat tigress. She was seemingly everywhere at once, taking on almost supernatural qualities in the minds of those she terrorized.
A desperate community seeks help
The Tahsildar — a local government official who serves as administrator and tax collector — was desperate. Many of the families in Uttarakhand were subsistence farmers, meaning abandoned fields weren’t just taking an economic toll on the area.
If the local farmers didn’t harvest, they wouldn’t eat.
The Tahsildar was the one who had to look grieving parents, siblings and children in the eye, telling them the government would figure out a way to stop a “demon” who had eluded hunters and soldiers for years.
When the Tahsildar approached Corbett, the Champawat tiger had killed an inconceivable 434 people. No other animal in recorded history had taken as many lives, let alone evaded retribution during a nearly decade-long stretch straddling two centuries and the border of two countries.
The notorious man-eater was loitering around a village called Dhari, where it had been spotted on the outskirts. For three nights the villagers were kept awake by the roars coming from the man-eater at the edge of the jungle.
Others were trying to track the tiger, the Tahsildar said, drawn by the considerable reward for the hunter who could finally rid the region of its felid scourge.
But Corbett didn’t want the money, saying he had an “aversion to being classed as a reward-hunter,” and he asked the Tahsildar to call off the other hunters for fear of getting caught in friendly fire.
After the men agreed to terms, Corbett and his small party set off on the 17-mile journey to Dhari. No one came to greet them when they arrived, wearily dropped their packs and sat down in a central courtyard. The place looked abandoned.
“The people of the village, numbering some fifty men, women and children, were in a state of abject terror, and though the sun was still up when I arrived, I found the entire population inside their homes behind locked doors,” Corbett wrote in his memoir, Man-Eater of Kumaon. “And it was not until my men had made a fire in the courtyard and I was sitting down to a cup of tea that a door here and there was cautiously opened, and the frightened inmates emerged.”
“That the tiger was still in the vicinity was apparent,” Corbett wrote. “For three nights it had been heard calling on the road, distant a hundred yards from the houses, and that very day it had been seen on the cultivated land at the lower end of the village.”
Corbett confirmed it was the tigress he sought, and the death toll had climbed to 435 when villagers reported the disappearance of Premka Devi, a teenage girl.
Devi had been gathering wood and foraging with a handful of other women when the tigress leaped out of cover, snared her foot and began dragging her away. She fought, holding onto a tree branch while trying to wriggle free, but the man-eater let go of her foot, lunged forward and sank her teeth into Devi’s neck in the fashion tigers most often use when taking down prey.
When the other women came running back to Dhari, a party of men set out to find Devi, but found only blood and torn clothing.
While the Demon of Champawat was known for disappearing into the night after her kills and re-emerging miles away, for reasons no one understood she continued to stalk the outskirts of Dhari. It was as if she was determined to take another life from the same village.
After the locals told him the animal had a “habit of perambulating along” the road leading into the village, Corbett decided he would try for the tigress that first night before she decided to range miles away to another village, as she was fond of doing when she knew she was being hunted.
The first hunt: Fear and regret
James Edward Corbett knew rural India. The son of a low-level official in the British Raj, Corbett grew up in poverty among 12 brothers and sisters in the Indian countryside, where he learned to track and hunt as a boy, traversing rough terrain barefoot and deciphering the clues left behind in the jungle when big cats and other predators took their prey.
Today Corbett’s name is still familiar to the people of Uttarakhand, with the largest national park — land he helped secure for a tiger habitat — bearing his name.
Photographers on a tour of the tiger reserve in Jim Corbett National Park.
The tiger reserve within Jim Corbett National Park. Credit: Jim Corbett National Park
He’s remembered as a champion of the often-forgotten rural poor and a legendary figure in big cat conservation circles. Long before he became a tiger conservationist later in life — calling the extraordinary animals “large-hearted gentlemen” who avoided conflicts with humans the vast majority of the time — he’d built a reputation as a man who could handle the most dangerous felid predators, tigers and leopards who had developed a taste for human flesh.
These were not the canned “hunts” of modern day, facilitated by teams of guides armed to the teeth with cutting-edge gadgetry and tracking devices, chauffeuring well-off weekend warriors in climate-controlled vehicles and luring unaware animals directly into their paths. Corbett and men like him hunted at extraordinary risk to themselves, on foot, at the mercy of the most cunning predators on the planet.
The Rigby .275, Corbett’s most famous rifle, was given to him by grateful officials of India’a government. Corbett’s reputation grew as he successfully hunted man-eating tigers and leopards, particularly those that had eluded other hunters and even the military. Credit: The Vintage Gun Journal
But at 31 years old, despite his repute as an excellent hunter, Corbett was in new territory. The Champawat tiger was his first man-eater, and nerves got to him. As he stood watch that first night at the edge of the village, he wondered if he’d made a lethal mistake.
“I had spent many nights in the jungle looking for game, but this was the first time I had ever spent a night looking for a man-eater,” he wrote. “The length of the road immediately in front of me was brilliantly lit by the moon, but to right and left the overhanging trees cast dark shadows, and when the night wind agitated the branches and the shadows moved, I saw a dozen tigers advancing on me, and bitterly regretted the impulse that had induced me to place myself at the man-eater’s mercy.”
Counterintuitively because of their coloring, tigers are exceptional at blending into high grass, jungle and forest.
The next day, Corbett asked the men of the village to show him several spots where the tigress had been sighted, but they refused. He was determined to resume the hunt at night, taking advantage of the full moon, and the villagers knew every inch of the surrounding territory. He needed their cooperation if he was going to successfully navigate the terrain by moonlight, avoiding pitfalls and places where he was likely to be ambushed.
Instead, the villagers wanted his help with a more mundane — but vital — task.
The village’s “headman” told Corbett that “if the crop was not harvested in my presence, it would not be harvested at all, for the people were too frightened to leave their homes.”
So Corbett stood watch with his Martini-Henry rifle as “the entire population of the village” emerged, and with the help of Corbett’s men, began harvesting their crops in double time, clearing almost everything before the sun set.
Earning the trust of the village
Still getting nowhere with his requests that the villagers show him where the tiger had been spotted, Corbett changed his approach the next day. He would embark on a hunt, he announced, and sought to kill a ghooral — a wild, goat-like animal — to provide meat for his men. If some of the villagers were willing to help point him in the right direction, he’d hunt two ghoorals for the villagers as well.
Some men of the village, who had never seen anyone fire a rifle, accompanied the hunter and, for a short time, forgot about the tigress who had taken over their lives.
“The expedition was a great success in more ways than one,” Corbett wrote, “for in addition to providing a ration of meat for everyone, it gained me the confidence of the entire village. Shikar yarns, as everyone knows, never lose anything in repetition, and while the ghooral were being skinned and divided up the three men who had accompanied me gave full rein to their imagination, and from where I sat in the open, having breakfast, I could hear the exclamations of the assembled crowd when they were told that the ghooral had been shot at a range of over a mile.”
With their neighbors and friends vouching for him, the villagers were more willing to believe this man who had arrived seemingly from nowhere, at the behest of the Tahsildar, really was a competent hunter and might be the one who could finally stop the tigress.
After they ate, some of the men — having seen Corbett’s professionalism and marksmanship for themselves — agreed to show him the tiger’s recent haunts.
The men brought Corbett to the stand of trees where Devi had been ambushed. Noting that “jungle signs are a true record of all that has transpired,” Corbett realized the tigress had approached the group of women from a ravine, slipping between a pair of large rocks unseen before seeing her opportunity.
“The victim had been the first to cut all the leaves she needed,” Corbett wrote, “and as she was letting herself down by a branch some two inches in diameter the tigress had crept forward and, standing up on her hind legs, had caught the woman by the foot and pulled her down into the ravine.
“The branch showed the desperation with which the unfortunate woman had clung to it, for adhering to the rough oak bark where the branch, and eventually the leaves, had slipped through her grasp were strands of skin which had been torn from the palms of her hands and fingers.”
A blood trail ran from the ravine to the ground cover of some bushes where the Champawat tiger “had eaten her kill.”
The party found Devi’s clothes “and a few pieces of bone which we wrapped up in the clean cloth we had brought for the purpose.”
“Pitifully little as these remains were, they would suffice for the cremation ceremony which would ensure the ashes of the high caste woman reaching Mother Ganges.”
For the next three days, Corbett tried unsuccessfully to find traces of the tigress as he moved between her haunts from dawn to dusk.
Credit: Enric Cruz/Pexels
Following the trail to Champawat
It was clear the big cat had moved on, so the hunter and his men decided to walk to Champawat town, the closest thing to a population center in the area. There, perhaps, they could pick up the trail again.
While on the road they were joined by local men who wanted to help, their numbers swelling as they passed villages. Some of the men told Corbett they’d seen the tigress dragging a still-living, screaming woman in a valley below the main road to Champawat two months earlier. Frozen with fear, the men did nothing even as the victim screamed for help and beat her fists against the predator’s flank. They were ashamed, they told Corbett, but they were farmers armed with sickles and machetes, without a firearm between them, terrified of approaching an animal who had killed everyone who went after her.
Corbett took up residence in an abandoned hut close to the site of several earlier killings, looking for signs of the tiger. Two days later, a man from Champawat town came running up, out of breath.
The tiger had struck again, he said. A girl of about 16 or 17 years was gathering sticks with a group of women when the tiger pounced, snapping her up in its jaws and already dragging the victim away before the others realized what was happening.
He brought Corbett to the spot, and the hunter began to follow a distinct blood trail. After following the predator’s path through nettles and over difficult-to-negotiate rocks, Corbett descended into a ravine where a pool of freshwater fed a stream.
He’d recovered the victim’s shattered necklace of bright blue beads and found her sari at the top of a hill, but now Corbett found himself looking at something he couldn’t place in context until he realized with horror that it was the girl’s leg “bitten off a little below the knee as clean as though severed by the stroke of an axe, out of which warm blood was trickling.”
Without knowing how close he was, Corbett had blundered his way in and interrupted the tigress in mid-meal. Now, he realized, he was standing still, exposed at the bottom of the ravine.
He turned and raised his rifle just in time to save his own life. The tigress had the high ground and was about to strike but turned and bolted when it saw the weapon, dislodging dirt and rocks from the lip of the ravine.
Corbett ran after her.
Credit: Pixabay
For the first time the tigress was put on the defensive, carrying her kill as she sought to shake the hunter on her tail. Several times Corbett found a larger pool of blood where the tigress had briefly put the girl’s body down.
Annoyed that a human was actually following her rather than running in the other direction, the tigress “now began to show her resentment by growling.” It was an intimidation tactic by a skilled predator who understood something of human psychology. When she realized Corbett still wasn’t dissuaded from following, the tigress went silent again so she wouldn’t give away her position.
Corbett’s heart pumped and he was driven on by a heady brew of excitement and fear. He could be eviscerated at any moment, or he could be the one who finally stopped the Demon of Champawat, killing her on the day she claimed her 436th victim.
It wasn’t to be.
With the sun low on the horizon, Corbett knew he had to backtrack to avoid being stuck in the open at night with the irritated tiger fixated on him. He made his way back, drawing relieved sighs from his new friends as he reappeared.
Hunter and hunted
That night, Corbett decided to change tactics. Instead of chasing the Demon of Champawat, he’d organize a beat like the Nepalese army had years ago, but this time instead of driving the tigress across a river, they’d attempt to drive her to Corbett and his rifle.
With the help of the Tahsildar, Corbett was able to enlist 298 men by noon of the next day, a ragtag group carrying weapons that “would have stocked a museum,” including a handful of vintage, illegal firearms. The Tahsildar distributed ammunition to the men who had guns, and Corbett had them line up on the ridge where the tigress had killed her last victim.
The Indochinese tiger, Panthera tigris corbetti, was named after Corbett. Credit: GlobalConservation
Corbett continued to the next hill with the Tahsildar. The terrain was rough and their progress slow. Perhaps believing Corbett had forgotten to signal, the men fired their weapons into the air and made as much noise as they could by shouting, beating drums and rolling rocks down the ridge. Leaving the Tahsildar on the hill, the hunter ran to an open field ahead and positioned himself between the ridge and a gorge, hiding in waist-high grass with his rifle.
He caught movement in the distance. It was the tigress. But instead of running from the commotion, she made to move toward it.
“When the din was at its worst I caught sight of the tigress bounding down a grassy slope between two ravines to my right front, and about three hundred yards away,” Corbett recalled. “On hearing the shots the tigress whipped round and went straight back the way she had come, and as she disappeared into the thick cover I threw up my rifle and sent a despairing bullet after her.”
The nearly 300-strong group spanning the top of the ridge threw up a cheer, thinking Corbett must have taken the tiger down with the shot. They fired off the last of their rounds in celebration. Corbett listened with grim anticipation, expecting to hear screams at any moment as the tigress broke cover and attacked the men.
But the Demon of Champawat had thought better of it and reappeared, running for the gorge behind Corbett at full speed.
Corbett raised his rifle and squeezed off another round.
“When the tigress stopped dead,” he wrote, “I thought the bullet had gone over her back, and that she had pulled up on finding her retreat cut off.”
But as he watched the murderous big cat regard him, Corbett realized he’d injured her. She lowered her head, closing to within thirty yards. Corbett fired again. The bullet missed its target. The tigress flinched but stood her ground “with her ears laid flat and bared teeth.”
Both man and tiger were unsure what to do next. Corbett froze. His rifle was empty. He’d brought three cartridges, reasoning he’d get no more than two shots off no matter what happened. The third, he wrote, was for emergencies. The tigress made to charge, coiling her body as she crouched low.
But the big cat had no way of knowing Corbett was out of ammunition and turned slowly, keeping an eye on the man who had clipped her. Then she took off, bounding over a stream, across a rough span of rocks and up the nearby hill.
Corbett ran back to the Tahlsidar and took his rifle, then went after the tigress.
He climbed the hill warily and watched the tigress turn to face him again. She charged. Praying that the Tahsildar’s rifle would strike true, Corbett aimed for the enraged cat’s head — and missed. But the shot caught the tigress’ right paw. She lurched, lost her footing and collapsed, coming to rest on the lip of a large rock at the summit of the hill.
One of Corbett’s earlier shots must have been more accurate than he realized, and the charge was the last desperate move by the severely injured animal. But Corbett didn’t have the time to think about that because the men of the beat were coming closer, screaming and working themselves into a frenzy.
“There it is on the rock!” one man shouted. “Pull it down and let us hack it to bits!”
“This is the shaitan that killed my wife and my two sons!” the ring-leader declared, waving a sword.
Corbett in the winter of 1930 after killing a massive male called the Bachelor of Powalgarh. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/historical file
But reason prevailed, the crowd’s rage died down, and for the first time Corbett was able to examine the tiger up close. He saw something he’d find again and again over the following years, as he became a famed hunter with a reputation for stopping man-eating tigers and leopards.
Tigers don’t become man-eaters by choice, and there’s no evidence they enjoy eating humans. Eating people is a dangerous business even for apex predators, who tend to have short lives once they start hunting humans.
They do it out of necessity, almost always as a result of human action: Hunters who hobble them but fail to finish the job, or fire errant shots that shatter one of their terrifying canines, rendering them incapable of taking down their usual prey, or making their preferred hunts much more difficult.
Those unfortunate tigers are left with two options: Find easier-to-kill prey, or starve to death. Even if the taste of human flesh is revolting to them, the madness of hunger compels them to hunt.
That, it turns out, is exactly what had turned the Chamapwat tiger into a man-eater. A hunter’s shot wasn’t true and shattered two of the big cat’s fangs, impeding her ability to deliver a proper kill bite in the instinctive fashion tigers kill their prey.
“When the tigress had stood on the rock looking down at me I had noticed that there was something wrong with her mouth, and on examining her now I found that the upper and lower canine teeth on the right side of her mouth were broken, the upper one in half, and the lower one right down to the bone,” Corbett wrote. “This permanent injury to her teeth — the result of a gun-shot wound — had prevented her from killing her natural prey, and had been the cause of her becoming a man-eater.”
The head of the “Demon of Champawat.” Note the broken upper and lower canines on the tiger’s right side. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The truth, sadly, is that man-eaters are almost always “created” by men.
“A man-eating tiger is a tiger that has been compelled, through stress of circumstances beyond its control, to adopt a diet alien to it,” Corbett wrote. “The stress of circumstances is, in nine cases out of ten, wounds, and in the tenth case old age. The wound that has caused a particular tiger to take to man-eating might be the result of a carelessly fired shot and failure to follow up and recover the wounded animal, or be the result of the tiger having lost his temper when killing a porcupine. Human beings are not the natural prey of tigers, and it is only when tigers have been incapacitated through wounds or old age that, in order to live, they are compelled to take a diet of human flesh.”
While tigers become man-eaters out of necessity and don’t like the taste of human flesh, man-eaters are not “old and mangy,” as some people believe, and there’s no indication that human flesh is detrimental to them. On the contrary, Corbett wrote, a diet of human flesh “has quite the opposite effect, for all the man-eaters I have seen have had remarkably fine coats.”
Corbett with the corpse of the Leopard of Rudraprayag, which officially killed 125 people during an eight-year streak of terror. Historians believe the leopard’s kill count was likely much higher, as many deaths in rural India went unrecorded. Unusually for leopards — who are said to retain their fear of man even after turning to eating humans — the Leopard of Rudraprayag was extremely aggressive, even breaking into homes to find its victims. The big cat, a male, eluded soldiers of the British Raj as well as Gurkhas for years until Corbett took on the hunt.
The last tigers
Today, with the World Wildlife Federation warning we’ve wiped out an incomprehensible 70 percent of the world’s wildlife in the last 50 years, and tigers numbering only 4,000 or so in the wild, you’d think man-eaters would be a thing of the past.
They’re not. In a five-year period from 2014 to 2019, tigers killed 255 people in India, where the majority of the world’s remaining wild tigers live.
In 2014, a male Bengal killed at least 10 people in northern India before moving on or limiting himself to natural prey. His reign of terror cast a shadow over a wide section of southern India’s Tamil Nadu. Some 65 schools were closed, people refused to travel at night and families stayed behind locked doors just as their countrymen did a hundred years ago when the Champawat tiger killed with impunity. The male tiger was never caught.
That same year, a man-eater who had killed three people was shot dead before it could take more lives. Local authorities used modern tools, including a network of 65 trail cameras, to hunt the big cat. Since then there have been sporadic conflicts between the big cats and rural villagers, often sparked by tigers and leopards going after livestock.
The felid-human conflicts happen because of habitat destruction. The tigers simply can’t avoid people because people are everywhere.
Yet even Corbett, who was known for killing them, eventually became known for saving them. By becoming the foremost expert on man-eaters after successfully hunting 33 of them, he understood better than anyone the pressures faced by big cats in a world where humans were rapidly expanding and clearing jungle.
A hundred years ago when India was home to an estimated 100,000 tigers and 300 million people, Corbett understood the tigers were in danger. Now the tigers number 4,000 and the humans 1.4 billion, and the situation for one of nature’s most iconic animals is extremely precarious.
Corbett played a big part in changing attitudes toward tigers and other big cats. A century ago most people hadn’t even heard of the concept of conservation. Corbett believed it’s possible for humans and big cats to live in proximity, and indeed India has seen the peculiar emergence of the so-called “urban leopard,” with that species proving adaptable as its surroundings change. Conservationists credit leopards with saving countless human lives by preying on the innumerable wild dogs who patrol the outskirts of cities and towns, including major cities like Mumbai.
“The author who first used the words ‘as cruel as a tiger’ and ‘as bloodthirsty as a tiger’ when attempting to emphasize the evil character of the villain of his piece, not only showed a lamentable ignorance of the animal he defamed, but coined phrases which have come into universal circulation, and which are mainly responsible for the wrong opinion of tigers held by all except that very small proportion of the public who have the opportunity of forming their own opinions,” Corbett wrote almost 40 years after the events in Champawat.
Corbett at 68 years old, in 1944. By that time he’d dedicated himself to the protection and conservation of tigers and other wildlife, warning that they would go extinct if measures weren’t taken to protect them. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Reflecting on his youth in the British Raj, the hunts he embarked on as a kid and as a teenager, and the nights he spent alone in the jungle with nothing but a small fire to keep him company, Corbett recalled hearing the calls of tigers and knowing that “a tiger, unless molested, would do him no harm.”
He recalled stumbling upon a tiger as he was hunting jungle fowl, watching the huge cat emerge from a plum bush and regard him with a look that said: “‘Hello, kid, what are you doing here?’ And, receiving no answer, turning around and walking away very slowly without once looking back.”
“And then I think of the tens of thousands of men, women and children who, while working in the forests or cutting grass or collecting dry sticks, pass day by day close to where tigers are lying up and who, when they return safely to their homes, do not even know that they have been under the observation of this so-called ‘cruel’ and ‘bloodthirsty’ animal.”
Corbett dedicated the later part of his life to the conservation and protection of tigers, and India’s first national park was named in his honor. In 1973, Jim Corbett National Park — an area covering more than 520 square kilometers — became the first implementation site for Project Tiger, a conservation plan by India’s government that has been credited with increasing the number of wild tigers in the country by three-fold, from a dismal low of 1,411 tigers in 2006 to almost 4,000 today.
And in 1968, Czech biologist Vratislav Mazák named a newly-recognized subspecies — the Indochinese tiger — Panthera tigris corbetti in honor of the famed hunter.
More than anyone, Corbett understood how dangerous tigers can be, but he also came to appreciate their strength, beauty and spirit.
“The tiger is a large hearted gentleman with boundless courage,” he wrote decades after that first man-eater hunt, “and that when he is exterminated — as exterminated he will be, unless public opinion rallies to his support – India will be the poorer by having lost the finest of her fauna.”
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The 295-lb former NFL lineman recently got a license to kill mountain lions, so when he heard about a puma that was “terrorizing” a Colorado community by existing near it, he packed his weapons of war, rounded up his hounds and set off, trailing testosterone like a beefed up Jim Corbett gone to deliver justice to the Champawat tiger.
First he spoke to a local homeowner, who had an ominous warning for him.
“And when we had talked to the landowner, they said, ‘Hey, we have house cats. And the cats are acting weird.’
No doubt the cats were agitated and wanted to get out there to cause havoc with their feline brother by existing and eating stuff. The cats would have to be dealt with later.
Arriving at the scene, Wolfe (what a badass name) found the remains of a recently-killed deer and knew the evil mountain lion hadn’t reformed its ways. By continuing to exist despite the discomfort of people in the area, and continuing to eat, the defiant cougar was practically asking to be hunted down and killed.
Moving downwind of the fearsome predator so that it wouldn’t smell the pheromonal cloud of machismo that permanently surrounds him, Wolfe began climbing. The ascent was exhausting — not only is the 6’5″ Wolfe almost 300 pounds, but he was also carrying his sword, his health elixirs and his Bow of Righteous Smiting, a 1,000-DPS legendary weapon he obtained after slaying the Goblin King of Dreadmoore. Wolfe was carrying more than 400 pounds up the slope when he caught sight of the puma and did what men of testicular fortitude do: he released the hounds, who cornered the cat and chased it up a tree.
Then, with righteous fury, Wolfe drew his bow and killed — excuse me, “harvested” — the mountain lion, whose species is notoriously averse to conflict with humans and has killed fewer people in a century than dogs do in a week. But what are a few inconvenient facts between friends, amirite?
When Wolfe descended the treacherous slope with the corpse of the mighty cat like Geralt of Rivia toting the trophy from a monster hunt, the villagers applauded and sang songs of his bravery, then feasted in his honor.
But all was not well, for when Wolfe posted the manly photos of himself posing manfully with the corpse of the big not-quite-big cat, a contingent of insignificant peons criticized him on Instagram for killing an animal that was allegedly “just surviving.”
So Wolfe did what men of his stature do, and went on Tucker Carlson’s show to cry about the rodential men and women nipping at his heels.
Wolfe on Carlson’s TV show. Credit: Fox News
It is said that the combined testosterone of Wolfe and Carlson created a vortex of badassery that threatened to spark untameable hair and muscle growth in anyone who ventured too close. Female assistants had to be ushered out of the studio before the segment began, and the lesser men manning the cameras had to sign waivers absolving Wolfe and Carlson of blame if they were transformed into hulking man-beasts by the combined presence of the former lineman and the scion of a TV dinner empire.
“I’ve been through some tough training camps, brother, but this hunt was – man – it beat me up bad. I was beat up bad. I’m all cut up and scraped up. I was in full-body cramps [and] barely made it up there,” Wolfe told Carlson.
Wolfe proceeded to regale Carlson with tales of how dangerous mountain lions are. Puma concolor, the scientific name for the species, is responsible for a whopping 27 deaths in the last century. That’s one person every four years, and most of those people triggered the confrontations by getting too close to puma cubs or cornering the animals. By comparison, dogs kill 25,000 people a year via attacks, and another 25,000 by spreading disease, the latter mostly in third-world countries. Cows killed 655 Americans over a nine-year period from 1999 to 2007. More than 40,000 Americans are killed in car crashes annually.
In other words, pumas rank extremely low on the list of potential dangers to people, despite their size and their superficial resemblance to much more dangerous African lions. Pumas/mountain lions, also known as catamounts and cougars, actively avoid humans and try to steer clear of conflict with people. When they kill a deer or even a pet, it’s not because they’re “terrorizing” communities — it’s because they’re obligate carnivores who need to eat meat to survive.
A mountain lion. Credit: Nicky Pe/Pexels
Wolfe explained that it’s important to “tree” mountain lions in order to do recon on them and make sure they’re appropriately big and impressive-looking.
“Those full-grown males will kill kittens as well, they’ll kill kittens to get the females to go back into heat,” Wolfe said, confusing terms and the dominance behavior of African lions with American pumas, which are not the same species. “It’s important to manage that herd, right? You have to manage every population of animal out here, especially mountain lions. So we got the dogs on ’em.”
Who knew cats were herd animals? Who knew pumas had decided to give up their solitary lifestyles and live in prides? Who knew former NFL linebackers arbitrarily killing random pumas qualifies as ‘managing a population’? Someone call the wildlife biologists so they can rewrite their field guides!
Despite his ability to scale mountains and slay (mountain) lions, Wolfe was wounded by the backlash when he posted photos of himself with his “harvest.”
“I can’t believe what’s happening to me…They’ve had 200 calls to Colorado Parks and Wildlife trying to turn me in like I did something wrong,” Wolfe complained. “I’ve been harassed.”
Disclaimer: Since this is the internet, and this post is bound to bring in readers unfamiliar with PITB and the fact that we’re sarcastic jerks, allow us to state for the record that Wolfe did not kill the Goblin King of Dreadmoore, does not own the legendary Bow of Righteous Smiting, and we’re not exactly sure if the villagers in the unidentified rural Colorado community threw a feast in Wolfe’s honor after he returned with the corpse of the cat that had been “terrorizing” their community. I mean, they probably feasted him, but we haven’t confirmed it.
Have you ever wondered what the world looks like to your cat?
Veterinarians, animal ophthalmologists and researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s ophthalmology group provided insight for this article and the accompanying images, which show how scenes look to us humans and to our feline friends.
The images are striking and show the relative strengths and weaknesses of feline vision. While cats see the world in muted colors and in less acuity than typical humans, they make up for it with their astounding night vision and their ability to instantly detect motion within their visual fields.
This image shows feline night vision at work thanks to the tapetum lucidum, a layer of tissue that acts as a retroreflector, increasing the amount of light that makes it to the photoreceptors in cats’ eyes. The tapetum lucidum is best known as the reflective “lens” that makes cat eyes appear to glow in the dark:
This image shows the trade-off compared to human vision. Cat eyes have a wider field of view, seen below, but they don’t pick up reds or greens, and their overall vision is blurry compared to average human eyesight, represented in the top image:
Night vision and extreme visual sensitivity to movement are important to cats as crepuscular hunters, allowing them to spot prey in low light conditions and to negate advantages from natural camouflage, as motion gives away the presence of prey animals.
Cats have a slightly wider visual field than people do, at approximately 200 degrees compared to the human 180 degrees, while most cats have between 20/100 and 20/200 vision. (That’s much better than Big Buddy sans glasses, whose 20/600 vision enables him to see blurry, colorful shapes and not much else. No wonder Little Buddy likes to torture his human by swiping his glasses.)
Of course, these images do not entirely account for how cats see the world, which is why I’ve created my own image. Behold a Buddy’s Eye View, showing how the world — and humans — look to him:
From Buddy the Cat’s perspective, humans are all servants, constantly standing by to attend to him.
Feline humor, news and stories about the ongoing adventures of Buddy the Cat.
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