No Beast So Fierce

by Dane Huckelbridge

  Tigers, however, have never been ones to pay much heed to statistics, and in order to lend some legitimate credibility to the Champawat’s tally, particularly the more obscure Nepalese portion of it, more tangible evidence than that is needed. Indeed, there are analogous and better-documented situations we can use to show that such prolific man-eating is not quite as implausible as it sounds. Plenty of prolific man-eaters are recorded throughout the recent history of South Asia, although to find the most relevant cases, one need not stray far from the Champawat’s original hunting grounds. As recently as 1997, a 250-pound female tiger terrorized villages in the Baitadi District of Nepal, just a short drive north of the Champawat’s home turf. By the end of January of that year, the cat had already killed some 35 people; by July, that number had climbed to 50. And by November, it had added another 50 on top of that. In total, in a mere 10 months, this lone tiger was able to kill over 100 people before the government finally dispatched it. Many of its victims, sadly, happened to be juveniles and adolescents, which most likely accounts for its accelerated hunting schedule of an average of 2.5 kills per week. (One can only imagine the all but impossible challenge of trying to promote tiger conservation in a place where two to three children are being devoured by a tiger on a weekly basis.) Were this Baitadi man-eater to have continued its spree uncontested for as long as the Champawat did, haunting the edges of villages and the fringes of the forest, snatching young goatherds and women gathering firewood for the better part of a decade, it is not implausible to think that its total count could have approached a thousand.

  And just across the border in India, in 2014, a tiger escaped from Jim Corbett National Park and killed ten people during a six-week rampage. That’s an average of 1.67 victims a week, over an extended period of time, in roughly the same geographic region where the Champawat once did prowl. And if there’s anything more haunting than the sheer number of victims claimed in such a short span by this contemporary cat, it’s the disarming similarity between its attacks and those of the Champawat more than a hundred years before. The first victim, a farmer in Uttar Pradesh named Shiv Kumar Singh, was found mauled in a sugarcane field, the tiger having almost certainly mistaken him for more conventional prey while he was stooped over cutting cane. The next, a young woman taking a walk at dusk—her name is not mentioned in the records—was grabbed by the neck and carried off into the trees. Not long after that, a laborer named Ram Charan went to the edge of the woods to relieve himself, only to be snatched by the tiger and dragged away, screaming for his life. His friends heard his shouts for help and discovered him lying on the ground with the flesh stripped from his thighs—he died not long after. And following the first three or four kills, which seemed to be cases of mistaken identity as the bodies were not actually eaten, the tiger finally figured out that our clawless, weak-limbed species was a fine source of protein, readily available. From then on, the tiger began eating its new prey, culminating with its final victim, an older man who was out collecting firewood in the forest when he was attacked. The tiger managed to consume part of his legs and most of his abdomen before a band of appalled shovel-wielding villagers scared it away. And in an almost eerie instance of déjà vu, this tiger too was female, it too was injured, and its appetite for human flesh also provoked a veritable whirlwind of hired hunters, elephant parties, and distraught locals—which only seemed to provoke it further.

  And in both of these modern examples—the man-eater of Baitadi and the man-eater of Corbett National Park—the tigers began preying on humans for essentially the same reasons: loss of habitat, loss of prey, and injuries to their teeth or paws. Strong evidence, clearly, that a compromised tiger with a relatively dense population of vulnerable humans within its territory can and occasionally will feed on them for as long as it is able, and at a terrifying rate.

  For modern examples of the actual quotidian challenges that a serial man-eater like the Champawat must have posed to nearby villages, one need not look further than Chitwan National Park—currently Nepal’s largest tiger reserve, as well as the home of rare one-horned rhinoceroses, slightly less rare leopards, and a trumpeting bevy of wild Asian elephants. Chitwan, like the vast majority of national parks and tiger reserves in Nepal and India, was once a royal hunting ground, used by the Shah and Rana dynasties over the centuries for its natural supply of tigers and elephants—both of which were considered, to varying degrees, royal property. It received national park status in 1973, when the rulers of Nepal first began diverting their efforts away from killing the once-plentiful tigers toward saving the few that still remained. Its status as hunting reserve aside, however, not a whole lot has changed over the last hundred years or so—at least not within the park itself. True, the local elephant stable, or hattisar, shuttles far more foreign tourists atop elephants these days than royal hunting parties, and tigers tend to be shot with telephoto lenses rather than Martini-Henry rifles. But beyond that, much is the same. Tharu settlements still dot the edges of the forest, villagers still graze their cattle in the trees and go into the brush seeking fodder and firewood (although not always legally), and the elephant handlers still perform puja offerings to the forest goddess before venturing into her domain. And, as one would expect in a patch of tiger forest hemmed in on all sides by people and livestock, man-eaters do occasionally appear. The methods of dealing with such tigers are nearly identical to those implemented by the Nepalese authorities of yore, complete with beaters, armed shikaris on elephant back, and even a nineteenth-century method for corralling the cats using long bolts of fabric known as the vhit-cloth technique, pioneered by the first Rana rulers—the only major difference being that tranquilizer guns are preferred to actual firearms whenever possible. If a tiger can be captured alive, the Nepalese authorities try to do so, condemning the guilty man-eater to a life sentence at the Kathmandu zoo rather than an execution. But in some cases, bullets do become a necessity, with mandates for termination coming—at least until recently—from the royal family itself.

  From a statistical perspective, the research of Nepalese tiger expert Bhim Bahadur Gurung provides what is perhaps the most complete picture of how and why the Champawat began to kill humans more than a century ago. By carefully documenting and researching tiger attacks in Chitwan National Park over the course of several decades, he has essentially created an FBI-worthy profile of how wild, elusive tigers can transform under the right circumstances into serial killers. Between 1979 and 2006, 36 tigers attacked a total of 88 people. The average age of the victims was 36, although the range was wide, from a 70-year-old man killed while collecting wild grasses near the forest, to a 4-year-old girl who was attacked in her own home. Among these victims, more than half were cutting animal fodder of some kind—an activity that involved venturing into forested areas and initiating a stooped posture—and 66 percent were killed while within one kilometer of the forest’s edge, indicating that tigers were venturing out of the deep forest and hunting on the marginal zones around human settlements. Attacks increased dramatically from an average of 1.2 persons killed per year between 1979 and 1998, to 7.2 killed per year between 1998 and 2006. This rise was due largely to dramatic growth in the human population in Chitwan, from virtually zero in 1973 when the park was established (the families who had lived there were forced to resettle elsewhere), to the nearly 223,260 people living within the park’s new, expanded buffer zone by 1999.* The problem was only exacerbated by grazing restrictions that limited use of communal land, and resulted in more frequent human incursions—often illegal—into forested zones for the collection of grass and leaves to feed livestock. This is all strong evidence of the correlation between the collection of forest resources and tiger attacks, with the majority occurring in the transitional zone where human and tiger habitation overlap, inflicted upon a growing human population actively seeking feed for animals or firewood for their homes.

  Even more interesting, however, is what we learn about the tigers. Sixty-one percent of the documented man-
eaters occupied severely degraded habitats with low prey densities. Of the 18 problem tigers that researchers were able to examine, 10 had physical impairments like missing teeth or injured paws, with 90 percent of these impaired man-eaters also living in degraded habitats. And of the man-eating tigers that left the forest’s edge and ventured into villages—the sort of desperate behavior the Champawat too would eventually exhibit—virtually all came from degraded habitats, and all were physically impaired. Unusually aggressive non-hunting behavior was also recorded in some of these tigers, meaning they were unwilling to leave a kill even when confronted by humans atop elephants, conduct almost unheard of among normal, wild tigers in healthy habitats. Gurung attributes this aggressiveness to increased competition between tigers for limited territory, and to previous negative encounters with humans, who most likely attempted to chase tigers away from livestock kills so they could salvage the fresh meat for themselves. One of these ultra-aggressive tigers killed five people within a few minutes, and then sat beneath a tree for several hours where a sixth person was hiding, roaring and waiting for them to come down—not the sort of performance one would expect from a famously shy and elusive predator.

  But this was the kind of behavior exhibited by the Champawat—an animal that was impaired, coping with a changing environment, and that had very fair reasons for being aggressive toward humans. Its pattern of killing almost certainly followed those of Chitwan’s most aggressive tigers today, as it became accustomed to hunting humans, first on its own territory in the grassy marshes and sal forests, and then later on ours, among grass-thatched huts and mud-walled houses. It would have progressed over time from chance encounters in the deep forest with woodcutters and foragers, to semi-deliberate confrontations on the forest’s edge with grass-cutters and herders, to intentioned kills on the outskirts of villages as farmers worked in their fields or walked into the brush to relieve themselves. As the research shows, the most problematic tigers—those with degraded habitats, physical impairments, and aggressive dispositions—seem to lose their fear of people altogether, and this is precisely what happened in the case of the Champawat. The human settlements that dotted the lowland terai ceased to be places of uncertainty and danger, as they were for most tigers, and instead became a veritable smorgasbord. And once that happened, a slaughter of unprecedented proportions commenced.

  While statistical analysis of tiger attacks may provide a solid understanding of the underlying causes, data alone does a poor job of communicating their attendant horrors. Attacks by man-eating tigers, though rare, are exceedingly traumatic, in almost every sense of the word. The death of a loved one is always challenging for families and communities, but it becomes far more so when that cherished individual has been mauled or even completely devoured by a striped, fanged, quarter-ton cat. And again, there are contemporary examples of tiger attacks in India and Nepal that provide some idea—albeit a very unpleasant one—of what the aftermath of a wild tiger attack entails.

  In the case of lethal maulings—attacks where the tiger succeeds in killing the victim, but either changes its mind or is chased away before it can feed—there is a small but extant body of medical literature on what those wounds involve. When tigers attack a human not out of self-defense, but as potential food, they generally approach the victim much as they would their usual prey of four-legged ungulates. A hunting tiger is stealthy—it approaches its target crouched low to the ground on silent, padded feet, and it waits with twitching tail until the right moment to strike. When that instant arrives, the ambush is lightning fast, and usually conducted from the side or the rear. There is sometimes an accompanying roar coincident with the initial strike—and at 114 decibels, roughly twenty-five times louder than a gas-powered lawn mower, what a roar it is. The tiger will generally use its ample claws to latch on to the prey around the flanks or shoulders, and then seek to kill it with a bite to the neck. On smaller prey, the tiger is more than capable of severing or damaging the spinal cord—its teeth are well designed to wedge between vertebrae and inflict catastrophic damage on the tender nerve tissue beneath, which it usually accomplishes quickly, and from the nape. On larger prey, tigers will knock over the animal first, then strangulate it with a choking bite to the trachea, possibly severing a jugular vein in the process. Humans generally fall into the first category, and when a tiger hunts our kind, it goes straight for the spine, although it will sometimes knock over the victim with a blow from its paws or the momentum of its body.

  Such was the case of an attack that occurred in the Nagpur Division of India, and was subsequently described in Forensic Science International in 2013; an event that bears a striking resemblance to those attributed to the Champawat. The victim, a thirty-five-year-old woman, was foraging for tendu leaves in the forest with her husband and a few companions. The woman was left briefly alone while her husband scaled a tree to pluck leaves right off the branches, when shouts of “tiger, tiger” rang out through the brush. Her husband reached her just a few seconds later, and he was able to scare away the tiger by shouting and hurling stones, but it was too late—she was already dead. When her blood-soaked sari was later removed, and an autopsy performed, the examination revealed “four deep puncture wounds” on the nape of the neck resulting in a “complete laceration of the right jugulocarotid vessel” as well as “compound fractures of the C3 and C6 vertebral bodies due to through and through penetration by the canines of the tiger as a result of enormous bite force used in the killing bite at the canines.” The spinal cord at these points was “completely lacerated with multiple foci of hemorrhages.” In addition to the severed jugular and broken spine, the victim also suffered multiple deep puncture wounds from the tiger’s claws on the arms, shoulders, and torso—some almost two inches wide—as well as a fractured right clavicle and a fracture dislocation of the left sternoclavicular joint from the sheer force of the initial blow. In this case, the death was classified as “accidental,” which although true in a legal sense, doesn’t capture the purposeful nature of a tiger attack. When one sees the heart-wrenching autopsy photo of the four perfectly spaced, quarter-sized holes on the back of the victim’s broken neck, one can’t help but feel tremendous pity for the family of the unfortunate woman, and shudder at the expertise with which a tiger does its deadly work. Not malevolently, as man so often does, but naturally, with the grace and ease that 2 million years of predator evolution have bestowed upon it.

  As to how the tiger can kill so effectively and quickly, we need only remind ourselves of the considerable toolkit with which the tiger is equipped. As we already know, tigers have four canine teeth that can reach close to four inches, and they have a total of ten claws on their forepaws of comparable length. This means that in the first milliseconds of a full-speed tiger attack, a human body must not only cope with a bone-fracturing impact comparable to that of a charging Spanish fighting bull, but also absorb fourteen simultaneous stiletto-deep stab wounds—four of which are usually inflicted on the back of the head or the nape of the neck. And that’s just the initial attack. If there’s any fight left in the grievously injured victim, it can usually be obliterated almost instantly with a fierce, spine-snapping shake of the head, or further flaying with all those bladed claws. Not surprisingly, survivors of actual tiger attacks are few and far between.

  But they do exist. Oftentimes, victims of tiger attacks survive either because the tiger is scared away before it can finish the job, or because it is acting in a defensive manner and not a predatory one—in which case the attack is geared more toward deterrence than nutrition (although tigers have been known to eat victims even when the attack was defensive in nature). Both were likely mitigating factors in the 1974 mauling, though luckily not death, of one tiger researcher in Chitwan, Dr. Kirti Man Tamang. At the time, he was perched some fifteen to eighteen feet up in a tree—a distance considered to be safe from tiger attack—to monitor signals from a radio-collared mother tiger dubbed “Number One” by the team. What he didn’t reckon on, ho
wever, was just how protective a mother tiger can be. Fellow researchers Fiona and Mel Sunquist, who were working in Chitwan at the time of the attack, describe it in the following passage from Tiger Moon, as witnessed from atop a nearby elephant:

  Kirti was moving around in the tree, pointing with the long aluminum antenna. He began to speak; then everyone heard the miaow of a young cub . . . Number One exploded out of the grass with a shattering roar. She made one leap up the tree and in a split second was on top of Kirti. He saw her coming and tried to ward her off with the antenna, but she flung it aside without noticing. She sank her claws into his thighs and buttocks and bit deeply into his leg. The force of her acceleration ripped Kirti off the branch and they both tumbled to the ground fifteen feet below . . . No one could believe what was happening. Kirti’s wife Pat repeated “Oh, my God,” over and over again, her voice rising in hysteria, but everyone else was dumb with shock. Before anyone could move the tigress charged again, her roars blasting through the silence. The elephants spun on their heels and bolted in blind panic ahead of the enraged tigress. Nothing could stop them. Equipment flew everywhere in a wild confusion of screaming and trumpeting. People clung to ropes or whatever they could find, trying not to be swept off the elephants in the headlong dash through the bushes.

  The research team’s elephants may have bolted, but a battle-scarred old tusker was on hand that had participated in royal tiger hunts years ago, before they were banned. It had been trained to be fearless around tigers and had few hesitations about going back into the jungle to recover the fallen researcher before it was too late. Dr. Tamang was found to be in shock but still alive, with a “grapefruit-sized” chunk taken out of his thigh and deep claw marks raking his legs and buttocks. By tiger standards, this was a relatively mild attack—a defensive swat by a mother to deter an over-curious researcher—and yet it still cost the poor man an emergency medical flight to Kathmandu, multiple skin grafts, a nasty bacterial infection, and five full months of painful recovery.