No Beast So Fierce

There is another reason tiger attacks may have gone unpublicized, though, and that was the cultural stigmas that often attended them. Predation upon man, conducted by a tiger, was almost cosmically aberrant to the Tharu people, whose syncretic belief system represented a melding of both Hindu and older animistic beliefs. Such attacks represented the unintended overlap of two separate spiritual spheres, in the unholiest of fashions. Tigers were regarded as the physical manifestation of the power and grace of the natural world—more specifically, of the forest, upon which the Tharu depended above all else. Under normal conditions, the tigers of the forest were seen as benevolent guardians, even protectors. But if their forest decided to send in a tiger to attack a village, then something in the spiritual health of the community was gravely out of order. A problem with its puja offering, a broken spiritual promise, or some other affront to the gods of the natural world grave enough to summon a distinctly striped form of punishment. Accordingly, it was common belief that the spirit of a tiger victim was doomed, at least in some unfortunate cases, to haunt the earthly realm as a bhut—a malevolent poltergeist of sorts capable of causing bad luck, illness, and even death. And since tiger victims were often totally devoured, the essential and extremely complex Tharu funeral rites of cremation and riverine release became difficult to perform, ensuring further spiritual calamity enacted by the bhut. These destructive spirits could take two forms, that of a churaini for women, or a martuki for men, and only the help of a shaman, or gurau, could keep them at bay. So feared were these specters, it was not uncommon for Tharu widows to pass a torch over the mouth of their departed husbands, to invoke their spirit not to return as a bhut, but instead continue on its path toward becoming a protective pitri, or ancestor spirit. And another complex ritual, involving head shaving, ceremonial rings of kus grass, and branches of the peepal tree, would be enacted thirteen days later to ensure that the proper progression had taken place. These funeral rites needed to be performed to create sacred balance in the village, and in the case of many tiger attacks where victims were partially or completely devoured, this was not always possible—resulting in a spiritual hurdle that put the entire community at risk. With this in mind, one can easily imagine a general reluctance among the families of tiger victims to call attention to the attacks, and risk being blamed for any communal misfortune down the line.

These kinds of stigmas have declined somewhat in the terai of Nepal and northern India in recent years, as the presence of bhut has slowly transformed from practiced religion to old-fashioned superstition, and man-eating tigers have faded—although not vanished entirely, as we shall see—from cultural memory. When talking to Tharu guraus in present-day Chitwan, I found that the perception of tiger attacks as a form of divine punishment does still exist, although they don’t attach any bad luck or ill will to the families of the victims, and they would never deny a funeral service if asked. In fact, they believe that the offended god or spirit will often deposit tiger whiskers on the ground around the village as a form of warning, to give the community the chance to come together and mend its ways before another attack occurs. In the Sundarbans of West Bengal, however, where village men still go into the forest to fish and collect honey, and where tiger predation is still a daily threat, the stigma against tiger victims is very much alive and relevant. Many locals refuse to even speak of tigers or utter their name, as they believe words alone are enough to summon snarls and stripes from the mangrove forests. And when tigers actually materialize and do attack, relatives of the victims are often similarly avoided. “Tiger-widows,” as they’re unceremoniously known, can be considered unholy or tainted, and at times face abuse from in-laws as well as general ostracism in the community. They are frequently treated as a source of bad luck and forced to live in isolation, where they can wear only white saris and must eschew all forms of decoration, including jewelry or bangles. They are barred from most ceremonies and festivals, and allowed to travel roads only under certain hours. Such shunning may sound cruel—particularly when imposed on a person who has already had a loved one killed by a tiger—but it stems from the very real fears of people who are totally reliant on the forest for their livelihood, and who cannot afford to associate with anyone who may have incurred the forest’s clawed wrath. The people of the Sundarbans pray and make offerings to essentially the same forest goddess as the Tharu do in Nepal and northern India—although they call her Bonbibi instead of Ban Dhevi—and they rely on her favor for protection from tigers. When that protection fails, they, just like the Tharu, know that something grievous must have happened to have lost her favor. And this is not something one would want to broadcast in any way.

But problem tigers have not vanished from the Nepalese terai. They still exist today. And to re-create what the first, harrowing manhunts of the Champawat must have been like, one need not journey far into the past at all.

When untangling the skein of information regarding the Champawat, the unavoidable point of entry is the sheer number of its victims.* The tiger is alleged to have claimed 200 victims in Nepal, and then later another 236 victims once it crossed into India. That’s 436 human lives taken by a single animal. To put that grisly number into contemporary perspective, the entire roster of the National Basketball Association evens out at around 450 players. So essentially—according to most published accounts—the Champawat very nearly consumed the entire NBA. While comparing its statistics with modern-day professional sports teams’ numbers may border on the whimsical, the horror and trauma it would go on to cause for the inhabitants of western Nepal and the Kumaon division of northern India at the turn of the twentieth century was viscerally and painfully real.

But if the number seems wholly beyond the realm of possibility, there are some other man-eaters bounding across the pages of history that clearly demonstrate that large-scale human predation is not beyond the capacity of many apex predators. In France, for example, between the years 1764 and 1767, a wolf—or possibly a wolf–dog hybrid—known as the Beast of Gévaudan reputedly killed some 113 people before Jean Chastel, a local hunter, finally shot it and ended its spree. It is a shocking number, but also one that is fairly well documented, thanks to ecclesiastic funerary records from the Gévaudan region. In 1898, a pair of lions known as the Tsavo Man-Eaters temporarily put a massive British railway project in Kenya on hold when they began pulling workers from their tents at night. Accounts vary as to the total number of victims, with some going as high as 135, although scientific tests conducted by the Chicago Field Museum, which has the taxidermied lions on display, has indicated that they probably didn’t actually consume more than thirty-five of their victims. And while its own total tally isn’t remarkable in size, the rapidity of the infamous shark that terrorized the Jersey Shore in 1916 has earned its status as the original “Jaws.” As to whether it was a great white or a bull shark is still debated—but either way, the deadly fish attacked 5 people and killed 4 in less than 2 weeks. And then of course there is “Gustave,” a Nile crocodile from Burundi with a reported length of more than twenty feet, a hide pocked with bullet scars, and an apparent taste for human flesh. In addition to the wildebeest and hippopotamus that comprise its diet, it is said by locals to have eaten as many as three hundred people. These may be some of the more publicized examples, but history abounds with similar predators that have taken humans as prey, in numbers that frequently extend into the dozens, and sometimes even the hundreds. Leopards, brown bears, alligators, even Komodo dragons—they all can and occasionally do attack and eat human beings. It’s not common, but it does happen.

That tigers are capable of attacking human beings, under the right circumstances, is beyond dispute. We may not be their preferred, or even usual prey, but that hardly means humans never serve as a source of nutrition. We are made of meat, after all. But is the tally for the Champawat Tiger, a number recorded under less-than-optimal circumstances for fact-checking, and larger than that of any other man-eater on record, actually realistic?

The number of two hundred victims in Nepal—as well as the overall tally of 436 victims—is generally cited in most scholarly works as a credible figure. Perhaps not exact, but reasonably close. This is the number cited later by Jim Corbett, the number evidently certified, tacitly or otherwise, by the colonial British government at that time, and this tally, or similar figures, are repeated by modern-day tiger researchers and tiger hunters alike. Nevertheless, there are some who initially greet 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 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.