Panthera tigris

Le Plus Grand Félin

Tigers of today are pretty close to the size of their prehistoric ancestors and remain the biggest of the cats. The largest is the Siberian tiger - properly called the Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) - hitting the scales at about 700 pounds. Never very numerous, the Amur population was about 1000 in the 19th century and the cats lived mostly in the Prymore and Khabarovsk districts along the Pacific coast of Russia. The current population varies depending on who you read, but 400 is a typical number.

Wild tigers are found in twelve countries other than Russia. A recent breakdown - 2011 - of the population was reported in India (1700), Maylaysia (500), Bangladesh (440), Russia (360), Indonesia (325), Thailand (200), Nepal (155), Myanrroar (85), Bhatan (75), China (45), Cambondia (20), Vietnam (20) and Laos (17). This gives us a total of 3617 - a few hundred more than the typically quoted number of 3200. But consider that in the mid-1940's there were about 40,000 tigers in India alone. You often read that there are more tigers in captivity in the United States than in the wild, but that may be a bit of an exaggeration since the wild population has been recovering from its low point in the last third of the 20th century.

Some tigers live in marshes and grasslands, but most prefer the rain forests. They don't, though, often climb trees. Tigers are, of course, hefty animals, so climbing isn't as easy for them as for their slimmer cousins like leopards. Also tigers' preferred prey - large ungulates (deer, pigs, and the like) and bovids (cows, sheep, and their relatives) - stick to the ground, and the distinctive stripes help the tigers blend in with ground foliage better than leaves.

The tiger we see above - or rather the pastel rendering of the tiger - is a white tiger. These are not a separate variety but instead are usually Bengal tigers with white fur although they are not true albinos.

White tigers arise from a rare and recessive gene. In the past, they have been found in the wild but with the low populations being restricted to specific areas, the likelihood that the gene will be in both a male and female meeting by chance isn't very likely. Then when it became fashionable for zoos to have white tigers - always a big drawing card - this led to captive breeding programs. But because of the potential for pooling poor genetic combinations, this practice has drawn censure from certain tiger-advocacy groups. Others, though, say that now with the white tiger population in the zoo's a bit more robust, it is possible to insure that the offspring don't arise from closely related parents.

Tigers have typical and atypical behavior compared to other cats. They are solitary animals (typical) and don't band together in prides as do the lions. They live in forests (atypical) and can climb trees (typical) but usually don't (atypical). Tigers also love water (atypical) and in zoos it's common to see them taking a dip to cool down.

Of course, the most famous stories of tigers is that they can become the dreaded MAN-EATERS - which is definitely atypical behavior (at least for cats). Now usually tales of marauding animals gobbling people up tend to be what you'd read in the macho men's adventure magazines that graced the shelves of supermarkets of small town America up to the 1970's. The truth is that almost all wild tigers stick to game animals for their diet.

And yet true stories of man-eating tigers still crop up every year or so. Sometimes the incidents are just due to bad luck and the result of the growing human population. Someone may be out walking in the jungle or on a game reserve and come upon a tiger. If the animal feels threatened, the tiger will attack. And despite what you read in the old adventure magazines, in one-on-one encounters the tiger almost always wins.

On the other hand, man-eaters of the type that deliberately seek out people rather than the bovids or ungulates are often old animals or otherwise those that can't hunt their regular prey. So they go after something that's easier to catch. In earlier times when communication and travel was slow and uncertain, a single tiger could eat hundreds of people before being hunted down.

There is a controversial case where a captive tiger was reintroduced into the wild and later (supposedly) became a man-eater. One explanation was its inability to adapt to hunting and its lack of fear with humans made it inevitable it would become a man-eater. You'll find this story on the Fount of All Knowledge, but the veracity is questionable as other writers can't even agree if the tiger lived in the wild for 10 years or died soon after being re-introduced.

Most nuisance animals - as they are courteously termed - can simply be captured and relocated. However with man-eaters this isn't so easy since 1) habitual man-eating tigers eat people because they can't hunt their natural prey and 2) no matter where you relocate them, they'll probably be some people around. Recently a tiger was suspected of killing a game reserve guard and was darted and taken to a zoo. Although it's now confined to one acre pen, there's some question whether the authorities have nabbed the right animal.

There are even some people who even claim that man-eating tigers are actually beneficial in that they keep the human population away from the forests and so prevent deforestation. As is often the case, the native communities don't feel particularly honored to live near such environmentally minded felines. When tiger attacks occur, all work in the district stops until the game wardens can capture the animal.

In his book Bring 'Em Back Alive, Frank Buck tells of how he wanted to catch a man-eater, and with the help of his friend, the feckless, irresponsible, and later reviled Ibrahim, the Sultan of Jahore, managed to do just that. Of course, the reason Frank wanted the man-eater is he figured it would fetch a better price than just your average bovid-eater. For what it's worth, Frank did catch his man-eater who ended up in the Longfellow Zoo in Minneapolis, which like Frank and his tiger, is no longer around.

 

References and Further Reading

101 Facts About Tigers (101 Facts About Predators), Julia Barnes, Gareth Stevens Publishing, 2004

An Environmental History of Postcolonial North India: The Himalayan Tarai in Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal, Eric Strahorn, Peter Lang Publishing, 2009

Man-Eaters of Kumaon, Jim Corbett, Oxford University Press, 1944. Also available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/maneatersofkumao029903mbp

"Tigers at the Gate", Jim Doherty, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2002.

Amur Tiger, David Prynn, Russian Nature Press, 2002.

"Has an Indian 'Man-eating Tiger' Been Wrongly Imprisoned?" Justin Rowlatt, BBC News, May 19, 2015

"Panthera tigris", IUCN Red List of Endangered Species, http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/15955/0.

"Wild Tigers Have Made a Dramatic Comeback: But How?", Debbie Banks, The Telegraph, United Kingdom, January 21, 2015

"I Fed My Arm to a Tiger," John A. Keel (as Randolph Halsey-Quince), Escape to Adventure, July 1957. A interesting "true adventure" where the ending was altered to fit editorial skepticism.