No Beast So Fierce. Dane Huckelbridge
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the number with a fair and understandable dose of skepticism, the author of this book included. After all, few things beget exaggeration like fearsome beasts, and the Champawat Tiger’s alleged butcher bill does certainly test the limits of credulity. A few pundits have even cast doubt on whether an adult tiger could survive on a diet of humans over such an extended period of time, as the Champawat appears to have done. But even with the rough numbers at hand, the math at least does seem to check out. According to the eminent Indian tiger specialist K. Ullas Karanth, a fully grown tiger needs to kill at least one animal weighing 125 to 135 pounds every week to survive. For normal tigers, this would obviously mean a moderately sized ungulate, like a boar or a deer, every seven days at minimum. Given that the average weight of the humans the Champawat Tiger preyed upon was probably close to that range, then it is fair to say that a fully grown man-eating tiger, so long as it maintained its weekly kill schedule, could readily substitute its ungulate diet with a human one and hunt at the same rate. And if we accept that the Champawat Man-Eater was probably active for the 8 or 9 odd years Jim Corbett’s account would later suggest, then that would come out to roughly 52 kills a year over the period—resulting in a hypothetical total of between 416 and 468 human victims, a range that the purported total of 436 human victims falls easily into. It goes without saying that such figures are anything but precise—and it’s quite plausible that the Champawat still included livestock and smaller wild ungulates in its diet as well, even while feasting upon humans. But the figures do, at the very least, show that its total victim tally from Nepal and India is not at all beyond the realm of possibility for a tiger that has adopted a primarily human diet, at least from a purely statistical point of view.
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