Angry locals say they’ll kill the tiger if forest rangers do not after the predator ambushed and ate a mother of two in southern India on Friday.
Forest rangers are on the hunt to capture a man-eating tiger who killed a woman and dragged her body into a forest on Friday, while frustrated locals say they’ll destroy the predator if the government does not.
The victim, a 45-year-old woman named Radha, was employed by a local coffee plantation in Mananthavady and was harvesting coffee beans when the big cat ambushed her, according to multiple reports in local media. Mananthavady is a city of about 47,000 people in southern India surrounded by rural farmland.
A Thunderbolt team — a special forces unit trained in counter-insurgency — was patrolling the area when they found blood and signs of a struggle. They followed the tiger’s pug marks into a nearby forest, where they found Radha’s body “half eaten,” the New Indian Express reported.
The attack and the livid response of people in the area highlight the conflicts that India must manage as it works to save tigers, the country’s critically endangered national animal, while also protecting the public. India’s government has relocated thousands of families away from the vast country’s 27 tiger preserves, but the big cats are oblivious to the boundaries of the preserves.
Earlier this month, people living in several contiguous towns over a stretch of more than 130 miles in eastern India barricaded themselves indoors, refusing to leave for work or to travel to local markets, after a pair of hungry tigers had drifted off a preserve and had begun to feast on local livestock.
A tiger who was seized and relocated from a roadside zoo operated by Joseph “Tiger King” Maldonado-Passage. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
In Mananthavady, locals threatened a hartal, a form of strike aimed at gaining concessions from the government, if the tiger is not killed. Forest rangers and local government leaders said they would capture and relocate the tiger, who has been spotted on a trail camera, but the locals say that’s not good enough.
“If you can’t shoot the tiger, then shoot us instead,” one protester told forestry officials.
Others said they’d take matters into their own hands if authorities don’t kill the tiger. It’s not an empty threat: in 2019, a mob of enraged villagers beat a tigress to death after she attacked a person.
Radha was the third person to be killed by tigers in the area since 2023, when two farmers were killed by the endangered apex predators in incidents about 11 months apart.
In addition to the anger and grief felt by family and friends of the victims, the government’s compensation program is also controversial. Radha’s family will receive ₹11 lakh, according to reports, which was about $12,800 in USD according to exchange rates on Jan. 25.
The program has been condemned by people who say the government is wrong to put an arbitrary monetary value on human life, and in recent years there have been attempts to provide families with resources like job training in addition to monetary compensation. The issue remains a sore spot and a topic of ongoing litigation because the government did not compensate victim families for decades, and does not automatically provide compensation if the victims trespass onto preserve land.
Tigers are the largest and most dangerous of all cat species, and are arguably the most dangerous land animal on the planet, but the vast majority of them do not attack humans and give people a wide berth. Unlike most other felids, they enjoy water and swimming, especially in warm climates. Credit: Warren Garst/Wikimedia Commons
In the meantime, a team comprised of rangers, veterinarians, expert trackers and others — totaling about 100 people — was racing to get to the tiger before the mobs do, utilizing drones, traps and thermal imaging cameras to find and capture the elusive predator.
“The animal is still roaming in the same vicinity, and we are strengthening local patrols to prevent further casualties,” KS Deepa, chief conservator of forests in the region, told local media.
Most tigers who turn man-eater do so because they can no longer take down their usual prey without difficulty, either due to old age or because their teeth are damaged. The infamous Champawat tigress, who killed 436 people during a decade-long reign of terror from the late 1890s through 1907, turned man-eater when a hunter’s bullet shattered one of her canines.
It’s wasn’t clear what forestry officials planned to do with the tiger if it’s captured, but they told reporters they are forbidden by law from killing the animal unless other options are exhausted.
“There are three ways to capture the tiger,” A.K. Saseendran, India’s minister of forests and wildlife, told The Hindu. “We will try to cage it as the first step. If that fails, we will try to tranquilize it and move it out of Wayanad. Killing the tiger is the last resort.”
For the first time, humans have successfully returned orphaned tiger cubs to the wild after raising them and training them to hunt.
For more than 50 years, tigers were absent from Russia’s Pri-Amur region.
Sparsely-populated, mountainous and blanketed in forest, the domain borders the heart of the Russian Far East, offering hundreds of thousands of contiguous square miles for the most robust sub-species of Earth’s most magnificent predator.
Here, tigers can roam without fear of conflict with local farmers, or roads that carve up habitat and pose a danger to animals trying to cross. Prey is abundant, and adaptations for surviving in the local terrain are coded into the tigers’ DNA.
Now that scientists have proven for the first time that tigers can be successfully reintroduced into such an environment, big cat advocates imagine Russia’s Far East as a haven for the large felids. It’s a place where tigers can thrive, mate, reproduce and change the outlook for their species, which has dwindled to only 4,000 or so remaining in the wild.
Credit: Leon Aschemann/Pexels
The project to reintroduce Amur tigers to their native habitat is a cooperative Russian-American endeavor. The team started by building a tiger conservation center in the Amur oblast a decade ago.
The facility is built in a way that orphaned tigers can be raised and taught how to hunt without directly interacting with their human caretakers. That’s a crucial component, because tigers who see humans as potentially friendly or sources of food have drastically reduced chances of surviving in the wild, and are easier marks for poachers.
After 18 months, the cubs are brought to remote locations in Pri-Amur and released. Of the first group of orphan tigers released into the wild, 12 were able to survive on their own.
One gluttonous tiger failed: he crossed over the border into China and began eating domesticated animals, including 13 goats in what researchers called “a single event.”
The fattened tiger then retraced his steps to Pri-Amur, and when he didn’t show fear of humans, the team decided he had to go. They captured him and sent him to a zoo, where he gets all the free meals he wants and contributes to the captive breeding program helping his species maintain genetic diversity.
With 12 out of 13 tiger re-introductions successful, the program provides “a pathway for returning tigers to large parts of Asia where habitat still exists but where tigers have been lost,” said Viatcheslav V. Rozhnov, who leads the reintroduction project.
Amur tigers are the largest cats on Earth. They’ve evolved to survive in regions where winters can be brutally cold and snowy, but they also thrive in spring and summer when the snows melt and prey is abundant. Credit: Pexels
The successful reintroduction has also led to some surprising developments. Two of the cubs, Boris and Svetlaya, were unrelated but were rescued at about the same time and raised in the Russian orphanage for their species.
Using tracking devices they’d placed on the newly-released young tigers, the research team watched as Svetlaya settled into a home range and Boris made a beeline for her, “almost in a straight line,” crossing 200km (120 miles) of terrain to reunite.
The team’s hopes were confirmed six months later, when Svetlaya gave birth to a healthy litter of cubs, the first natural-born tigers to result from the reintroduction project.
Another tigress, Zolushka, also gave birth to a healthy litter when she was reintroduced in an area closer to a still-extant population of Amur tigers. The researchers believe the father was born wild in the region and was not part of the reintroduction program.
The wilderness in Pri-Amur and its environs is so vast, untouched and undesirable to human habitation that it could be home to generations of tigers, securing their future after so many decades of grim news for the iconic big cats.
“The grand vision is that this whole area would be connected,” Luke Hunter, executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Big Cats Program. “There’s lots of habitat that could be recolonized by tigers.”
Roadside zoos persist despite recent law changes, but even the best zoos fail to provide adequate facilities and enrichment for big cats, the report found.
The Amur tigress at Bearsdley Zoo is the lone occupant of her enclosure, which is large by the zoo’s standards, outfitted with a pool, toys and other enrichment, but small compared to what her natural range would be.
When I visited last summer, I spent the better part of an hour watching her pace the perimeter of her enclosure, walking in an endless loop as if in a daze, never stopping, altering her stride or reacting to anything.
But what made me realize how bad captivity really is for big cats was what I saw at the Smithsonian National Zoo, a well-funded world class facility. The tigers there have two outdoor enclosures with a topographic design: they’re vertical spaces separated into tiers, with large trees and narrow “caves” for shelter from the elements. Both enclosures are surrounded by wide moats that ring the perimeter just inside the security fencing.
One of two similar Bengal tiger habitats in the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington. Credit: ZooChat
It was feeding time on a hot summer day. Lionesses chowed down on large slabs of meat and licked blocks of ice, but the lone male tiger next door was pacing in a circle. He paced and paced, covering the same 10 to 12 feet, ignoring his food. I watched him for a long time. His behavior was a clear sign of zoochosis.
If a tiger in a national accredited zoo — where an entire team of keepers and caretakers is responsible for enrichment and welfare — suffers from clear signs of captivity-induced distress, what chance do tigers in other facilities have?
When we think of big cats suffering in captivity, we think of the roadside zoos where the Joe Exotics and Doc Antles of the world exploit them for financial gain, drug them, force them to take selfies with visitors and keep them in cruel conditions. But a new report from Born Free USA goes beyond roadside zoos and says big cat arrangements, even in the best zoos, are inappropriate, unhealthy and demoralizing for the animals.
“Unable to escape the crowds of humans, unable to follow some of their fundamental urges such as hunting and roaming over large distances, unable to fulfil their social needs – whether that be living solitarily or forming a pride with others – big cats show us their mental anguish by adopting abnormal behaviors,” reads the report [PDF], Clawing at the Cages. “These behaviors, known as stereotypies, manifest in obsessive pacing. Some big cats spend most of their days tracing the same, short, tedious route around their enclosures. This behavior is a recognized sign of stress, and only documented in captive animals.”
A captive jaguar. Credit: Yigithan/Pexels
The wild lives of animals like tigers are fundamentally at odds with the concept of zoos. In the wild, tigers range up to 50 miles in a single day, occupying vast ranges. Male tigers protect their home ranges, their mates and their cubs from other males as well as threats of all sorts.
That sort of lifestyle, which is hard-coded into their DNA, is not compatible with a guest-oriented operation in which habitats are designed primarily to give people the best view of the animals.
Lions might have it slightly better, though that’s arguable. As a social species they can interact with each other and they tend to have larger enclosures, but zoos rarely group animals according to their preferred family units or prides, instead matching individuals according to breeding plans as part of conservation efforts.
Yet even the conservation aspect is iffy, according to Born Free USA. Because of restrictions on “importing” animals and a population that is descended from just a handful of big cats, inbreeding is rampant. There’s a lack of scientific research on the captive zoo-held population, but the authors cite a 1983 study that found “six animals out of the approximately 1,000 Siberian tigers held in zoos in 1983 were responsible for 69.4% of the founder representation of the living population at that time. 70% of the population had a positive inbreeding
coefficient.”
Because little has been done to remedy that genetic bottleneck, “genetic viability remains low, and inbreeding of big cats in zoos can only have increased in the intervening years since these studies,” the report states.
Inbred cats suffer more health problems, don’t live as long and are much more susceptible to birth defects.
A cheetah. Credit: Magda Ehlers/Pexels
Despite the passing of the Big Cat Public Safety Act, Born Free USA’s report notes, roadside zoos still exist, and many of them have simply ignored the new laws because their operators know inspectors are overworked and lack manpower. Years can elapse between inspections, even at roadside zoos operated by serial offenders with long histories of keeping animals in abysmal conditions.
For example, Single Vision of Melrose, Florida — which bills itself as a “conservation” facility — openly flaunts its mistreatment of big cats with enormously popular video content from “Safari Sammie” on Youtube, TikTok and Instagram, despite the fact that it’s been the subject of dozens of violations and has an ignominious record when it comes to the health of its big cats. The facility was charged with 20 violations of animal rights laws in the previous two years, and has had multiple cases of animals dying due to neglect, yet continues to sell “experiences” in which “guests” can interact with heavily sedated tigers, jaguars, cheetahs and other wild cats.
In her videos, “Safari Sammie” — an employee of Single Vision — is routinely seen interacting directly with the apex predators, treating them like house cats and creating dangerous situations.
Other roadside zoos and animal “experience” operators continue to intentionally inbreed big cats to create “exotic” white tigers as well as ligers, tigons and other hybrids that aren’t found in the wild but are big attractions.
Overall, the report found:
Zoos fail to provide adequate environments for big cats, including lack of space, lack of ability to hide from public view, and the regular practice of locking big cats in tiny night quarters during the hours when zoos are
closed. The latter often results in big cats spending the vast majority of their time significantly confined.
Social and behavioral needs are not met in zoos. For example, solitary big cats are often forced to live with conspecifics, and social big cats are prevented from creating natural prides. Big cats are prevented from
hunting live prey – a behavior fundamental to them – while often housed alongside prey animals who also suffer stress from being forced to live near predators.
Inbreeding of big cats has become commonplace due to limited genetic diversity among captive populations, as well as unethical and deliberate inbreeding of color morphs such as white tigers and lions,
resulting in significant health issues for the cats involved.
Due to the inbreeding of big cats in zoos, as well as their habituation to humans, big cats kept in zoos are generally not candidates for release to the wild. As such, extensive and ongoing breeding programs simply serve to ensure that zoos remain “stocked” with these animals.
Monitoring of data on big cats in captivity is incomplete, with significant numbers of individuals disappearing from studbooks – the databases ostensibly responsible for tracking living big cats in captive facilities.
The licensing system intended to implement the Animal Welfare Act in the United States only achieves superficial monitoring of big cats in zoos, due in part to its risk-based assessment protocols as well as lack of meaningful
information in reporting that would allow effective public understanding and external expert oversight.
Despite the introduction of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in the U.S. in early 2023, some facilities continue to engage in dangerous activities with big cats, both in violation of, and in compliance with the new law.
Zoos around the world have killed healthy big cats due to overcrowding and lack of perceived usefulness to breeding programs. Other healthy big cats have been killed when human error or enclosure failure allowed their escape, or when attacked by conspecifics in their enclosures.
Due to all the issues above, and others, the overall health and welfare of big cats is compromised in zoos. This results in high mortality (particularly in infants), and recognizable signs of stress in the form of significant occurrences of stereotypic behaviors.
The report includes detailed anecdotes of typical problems in captive situations involving jaguars, lions, tigers and cheetahs, documents persistent problems with habitat design and security, and outlines loopholes and other problems with existing laws, which still don’t go far enough to ensure some of the world’s most iconic apex predators aren’t exploited and forced to endure lifelong misery.
You can find the report’s landing page, with links to a petition, a summary and the full text here.
A Bengal tiger mourned his longtime mate and then did something extraordinary, replacing her as their cubs’ primary caregiver.
The magnificent tiger in the photo above is officially called P-243, but he’s affectionately known to locals as The Hulk of Panna.
He made his home about a decade ago in the Panna Tiger Reserve, a 210-square-mile national park in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, home to more than 72 million people.
What makes him special, aside from his massive frame, is the fact that when his longtime mate died and left four of their cubs to fend for themselves, the Hulk stepped up and became a full-time dad.
The mom, known as P-213-32, had previously given birth to a litter of four cubs, but only two survived. As far as the rangers at Panna National Park could tell, the Hulk and P-213 had been together for years. The new cubs were their second litter.
The Hulk “was not seen with any other tigress,” the rangers wrote in a report.
On May 12, 2021, park rangers were concerned when P-213’s radio collar began transmitting potential mortality signals, alerting them to the fact that the tigress hadn’t moved for about six hours. The rangers observed her from a distance, then dispatched a team of elephant scouts to take a closer look.
T1 (tigress 1) was known as the matriarch of the Panna Tiger Reserve. After poachers nearly wiped out the entire population of tigers almost 15 years ago, T1 and another tigress were the last two female tigers. T1 herself gave birth to 13 cubs and today the reserve has more than 80 of the endangered big cats living within its boundaries. Credit: RS Murthy
The use of elephants by experienced riders in India to monitor tigers is as ancient as it is ingenious — while virtually every other animal in a tiger’s habitat gives the big cats a wide berth, elephants and tigers have an unspoken mutual agreement, a kind of wild non-aggression pact. That’s because as massive and powerful creatures who move in packs, elephants are too much trouble for tigers to bother with. Unlike their lion cousins who do hunt elephants opportunistically, tigers don’t form prides and even if elephants were solitary animals and easier to hunt, even a mother and her hungry cubs — let alone a single tiger — can’t eat that much meat. They also can’t transport the kill to safer dining spots the way they do with their typical prey.
So tigers and elephants tend to do little more than acknowledge each other’s presence, and the tigers have learned that humans riding on elephants aren’t hostile.
The elephant rangers who got close to P-213 realized the tigress had a swollen right forelimb and they made the decision to sedate her. For the next two nights, field veterinarians accompanied the rangers and administered painkillers and antibiotics. The treatment seemed to work, the swelling was reduced and the tigress was ambulatory if still sluggish, but she died less than a week later.
Her death “came as a shock to all of us,” the team wrote. “A beautiful tigress and a caring mother, [her death] left her four cubs alone.”
Frustratingly, a postmortem and lab analysis of her blood didn’t turn up any obvious cause of death.
P-213’s death “was itself heavy loss to bear but now the major worry was her four orphaned cubs,” the ranger team wrote. The cubs were last seen with her on May 10, about 11 days before she died. The two previous days they’d been spotted sharing a kill with their mother, and rangers reported the cubs looked strong and healthy.
A few days later, after an exhaustive search by five elephant riders and 50 park rangers, a ground team found the cubs “healthy and active and [did not appear] hungry or stressed.” They also spotted their father, the Hulk, nearby.
What happened next was extraordinary.
After park rangers cremated P-213, the Hulk approached the site about an hour after the last people cleared out. The next day, rangers observed him “sitting for long hours at the place where P-213 died.”
They also saw the dedicated mate and father calling out softly as he looked for his cubs, three males and a female who were about seven months old at the time.
A few days later, the Hulk successfully hunted a sambhar, a type of deer, and shared the kill with his cubs according to a local news report. Then on June 6, the Hulk was spotted feeding the kids again after he killed a cow.
“For the entire day the tiger remained in the area but did not eat the kill. This was unexpected behaviour from a tiger and the PTR management deployed ground staff deployed to find out the reason,” the news report said. “The team found that the area where the tiger killed the cow is the territory of four tiger cubs. This male tiger, known as P243, is their father. The cubs had lost their mother a month ago.”
The Hulk prowls his territory. Credit: Sanjeev Siva
As if he hadn’t done enough to earn “dad of the year” honors for his species, the Hulk was even spotted playing with his offspring.
“After the death of the tigress, we located these cubs and placed camera traps in the area,” said U.K. Sharma, the director of Panna Tiger Reserve. “We found that the tiger visits these cubs regularly, and his behavior shows that he is not a threat to the cubs. We have seen the cubs playing with the male tiger and sharing kills.”
The team at Panna reserve continued watching closely and got to see the cubs flourish in the care of their dad. There were moments of uncertainty when rangers went days without seeing the cubs or finding their pug marks, but their fears were always put to rest by trail cameras that captured images of the Hulk with his kids in tow, resting with them in favorite spots and sharing meals with them as he taught them to hunt and survive.
Because male tigers typically aren’t known for nourishing behavior and their traditional role is to defend their territory to keep their mates and cubs safe, the Panna reserve’s staff were ready to step in if things began to look dicey. They never had to. A follow-up report about eight months later, when the cubs were healthy and fast-growing 15-month-olds, affirmed the team’s earlier decision to stay hands-off and let the Hulk do his thing.
“Surviving the wild without mother tigress is no mean feat but surprises do happen,” the rangers wrote. “And these become experiences, practices and lessons for the future. The lesson learnt is ‘[the] best thing one can do when tiger cubs are growing is to let them grow. Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.'”
The tiger had authored an unprecedented reign of terror, killing more people than any other animal in recorded history. Some villagers thought the ferocious cat was supernatural and dubbed it the Demon of Champawat.
They called it the Land of the Gods.
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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