No Beast So Fierce. Dane Huckelbridge
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taking up most of its time, the normal tiger has more important things to worry about; we barely rate a passing glance. We are a nuisance to be avoided, and nothing more.
However, for the abnormal tiger—that is to say, the tiger that has shed for whatever reason its deep-seated aversion to all upright apes—there are essentially two ways it will kill a member of our species.
The first category of attack is a defense mechanism, a means of protection, and it is employed only when a tiger sees a human as a threat to its safety or that of its cubs. When a mother tiger is surprised in a forest, or when a wounded tiger is cornered by a hunter, its instincts for self-preservation kick in and the claws come out. This tiger will often roar, come bounding in a series of terrifyingly fast leaps, and commence beating its human target head-on with its front paws, with enough power in most cases to smash the skull after the first strike or two. And from there, it only gets worse—according to Russian tiger specialist Nikolai Baikov, once the offending human is on the forest floor, “the tiger digs its claws as deeply as possible into the head or body, trying to rip off the clothing. It can open up the spine or the chest with a single whack.” This is strictly a combative behavior, the inverse of predation (although defensive attacks do sometimes result in consumption as well). It manifests itself when the tiger senses imminent danger, and for that reason, calls upon its considerable resources to save its own skin—figuratively, and, given the price a tiger pelt can fetch on most black markets, literally as well.
And the results of this behavior, as the rare individual who is both unfortunate enough to encounter it yet still fortunate enough to survive it can tell you, are understandably horrific. There exists a video—and a quick Internet search will readily reveal it—of one such attack that occurred in Kaziranga National Park in northeastern India in 2004. Filmed from atop an elephant, it shows a group of park rangers tracking a problem tiger that had roamed beyond the boundaries of the reserve and begun killing cattle—almost certainly as a result of diminished habitat and limited natural prey. Armed with tranquilizer guns, their intent was not to harm the tiger, but rather to capture it before angry farmers did, and return it safely to its home in the park. But alas, the four-hundred-pound cat was not privy to this plan. Although grainy, and shot with an unsteady hand, the film makes the terrific competence with which a tiger can protect itself abundantly clear. With astounding speed and athleticism, the roaring tiger materializes from the high grass as if out of nowhere, leaps over the elephant’s head with claws at the ready, and with merely a single glancing blow, manages to shred the poor elephant driver’s left hand to bloody ribbons before making its getaway. And this happened to a group of heavily armed men mounted on towering pachyderms—one can imagine what such a tiger could have done to a single individual alone in the forest. They would have been dead before they had time to squeeze off a shot, a fact supported by one lethal Amur tiger attack recorded in 1994 in the Russian Far East—the local hunter’s gun was found still cocked and unfired, right beside his mittens, while his ravaged remains were discovered in a stand of spruce trees one hundred feet away.
There is, however, a second means of attack that the tiger employs when it regards something not as a threat, but as a potential food source—one that relies less on claws than it does upon teeth. Specifically, a set of three- to four-inch canine teeth, the largest of any living felid (yes, saber-toothed tigers are excluded), designed to sever spinal cords, lacerate tracheas, and bore holes in skulls that go straight to the brain. And it makes sense a tiger would have such sizable canines given their usual choice of prey: large-bodied ungulates like water buffalo, deer, and wild boar. Two of the Bengal tiger’s preferred prey species—the sambar deer and the gaur bison—can weigh as much as a thousand pounds and three thousand pounds, respectively, which gives some idea of why the tiger’s oversized set of fangs are so crucial to its survival. They are the most important tools at its disposal for bringing down some of the most powerful horned animals in the world. To crush the muscle-bound throat of a one-ton wild forest buffalo is no easy task, but it is one for which the tiger is purpose-made.
The tiger’s evolutionary history, however, begins not with a saber-toothed gargantuan eviscerating lumbering mastodons, but with a diminutive weasel-like creature scampering among the tree branches. With miacids, more specifically, primitive carnivores that inhabited the forests of Europe and Asia some 62 million years ago. Bushy-tailed and short-legged, these prehistoric scamps lived primarily on an uninspiring diet of insects. Their bug-feast would apparently continue for another 40 million years, until the fickle tenets of evolutionary biology put a fork in the road—some miacids evolved into canids, which today include dogs, wolves, foxes, and the like, while a second group, over the eons that followed, would turn into felids, or cats. Initially, there were three subgroups of felids: those that could be categorized as Pantherinae, Felinae, and Machairodontinae, with the third, although today extinct, including saber-toothed Smilodons that were indeed capable of ripping the guts out of woolly mammoths, thanks to their foot-long fangs and thousand-pound bodies.
Tigers, however, arose from the first group. Unlike leopards and lions, which both came to Asia via Africa (there are still leopards in India today, as well as lions, although only very small populations survive in the forests of Gir National Park), tigers are truly Asian in origin, first appearing some 2 million years ago in what is today Siberia and northern China. From this striped ancestor, nine subspecies would emerge, to spread and propagate across the continent, of which six still survive today, albeit precariously.
The Bali tiger, the Javan tiger, and the Caspian tiger all went extinct in the twentieth century, due to the usual culprits of habitat destruction and over-hunting. The first vanished from the face of the earth in the early nineteen hundreds, although the latter two subspecies seemed to have hung on at least until the 1970s. The extermination of the Caspian tiger is especially unsettling given the sheer size of its range—the large cats once roamed from the mountains of Iran and Turkey all the way east to Russia and China.
Of the tiger subspecies that still exist today, the Amur tiger—also known as the Siberian tiger—has stayed closest to its ancestral homeland in the Russian taiga, and continues to prowl the boreal forests of the region in search of prey. This usually means boar and deer, although at least one radio-collared tiger studied by the Wildlife Conservation Society, or WCS, was recorded as feasting primarily on bears. It seems the Amur not only has a preferred method of killing bears, involving a yank to the chin accompanied by a bite to the spine, but that it is also somewhat finicky, preferring to dine on the fatty parts of the bear’s hams and groin. With a thick coat, high fat reserves, and pale coloration, the Amur tiger is well suited to the wintry landscape of the Russian Far East. It is generally considered the largest of all the tiger subspecies, with historical records showing weights of up to seven hundred pounds, although a modern comparison of dimensions reveals that Bengal tigers in northern India and Nepal today are actually larger on average than their post-Soviet relatives farther east. Research hasn’t effectively concluded why Amur tigers are physically smaller today than in centuries past, although the removal from the gene pool of large “trophy” tigers could well be a factor. The Amur tiger’s current wild population numbers only in the hundreds, confined to a few pockets of eastern Russia and the borderlands of China.
While the northernmost realms of East Asia are prowled by what little remains of the Amur tiger population, the warmer climes to the south claim their own small subgroups of Panthera tigris, in the form of the Indochinese tiger, the Malayan tiger, the Sumatran tiger, and the South China tiger. All of their populations are atrociously small, with the South China tiger bearing the ignominious distinction of being categorized, at least recently, as one of the ten most endangered animals in the world, and quite possibly extinct in the wild. The future of all tigers is precarious at best, but in the case of these lithe jungle dwellers, considerably smaller on average than their brethren to the north, it is even more so.
Farther west, however, in the forests of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, there is another tiger yet, and although endangered, it has miraculously managed to maintain numbers that border on the thousands. It is the tiger of Mughal emperors and maharajas, of Rudyard Kipling and William Blake. The tiger that Durga, the Hindu mother goddess, rode into battle to vanquish demons, and that the rebellious Tipu Sultan—also known as the Tiger of Mysore—chose as his standard. It is the tiger that yanked British generals from their