Man-eaters

[sanjay]

Text Version of Above Images by Pckts

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The "sport" of pursuing so-called man-caters has an added thrill, and no one pursued them more relentlessly than the late Jim Corbett, who described his experiences so vividly in The Man-Eaters of Kumnon. Corbett was a celebrated hunter of tigers in the heyday of the British Raj, and this book was a textbook in high schools, catching that particular generation at the most impressionable age. He enjoyed the Viceroy's patronage and therefore what he said was the last word. If he called a tiger a man-eater who was there to dispute it ? Every person missing for reasons unknown, including those killed by leopards or humans, could conveniently be accounted for as tiger-kills and were entered in the district records as such. 

I read and re-read his book and visited some of the tigerlands he described, and I found it difficult to agree with many of his observations. For one thing, it is certainly not old age that turns a tiger into a man-eater; all tigers become old (barring accidents) but all do not turn into man-eaters. A bullet or a porcupine quill in the mouth or forepaw is regarded as another cause of a tiger becoming a man-eater. This is also doubtful, because the wound that prevents the tiger from stalking and killing game can be an equally strong impediment to killing a man. In fact a tiger has to cover even longer distances if it turns man-eater because when someone is killed in a village everyone for miles around becomes alarmed and vigilant. What is a man-eater supposed to eat between one man-killing opportunity and the next ? Does he go hungry for months or does he struggle to obtain normal rations ? And if he can kill game in the ordinary way between incidents of man-eating then what is one to make of the excuse of broken teeth or disabling wounds?

Corbett's blood-curdling tales were of course by no means the only ones. Colonel Keshari Singh, known as the "Tiger of Rajasthan", also tells many stories about man-eaters. One such was the case of a tiger carrying off a newly-wed village girl while she was sleeping beside her husband in a locked but at Ganwari, 96 km from Jaipur. I cannot myself believe any tiger would enter a but to stalk a prey. Such accounts naturally tended to remove the last trace of sym-pathy for the tiger from the heart of civilized man. But were all these stories true? I determined to investigate cases of man-eating.

During the last thirty years in the States of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Assam and Bihar, all excellent tiger habitats, there have been no reports of man-eating tigers. There has been only one report from Andhra Pradesh; this happened some sixteen years ago and no details of the incident are available. In Karnataka the last record of a man-eating tiger was in December 1959, when an old woman was dragged away by a tiger while she was collecting myrobalan fruits. In April 1970 while I was travelling in Taroba National Park in Mahar-ashtra I was told about a recent case of man-eating and I went to the Chandrapur Hospital to talk to the victim. It seems that the woodcutter must have approached too close to a tigress with two cubs and she jumped on the man, catching him by

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cubs — declared to be "potential man-eaters".

N. N. Scn, who was my immediate boss in the Forest Service and virtually brought me up in the profession, had shot 17 tigers during the heyday of shikar in United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) while Corbett was hunting in the same area. He also claimed to have killed a man-cater in 1944 in the Haldwani forests, but the only evidence he could put forward that this particular tiger was a man-cater was shaky. Some tiger had killed a man who was cutting grass and only one leg was recovered, but just who ate the body was not known. Since that event six tigers of different sex, age and size were shot within an area 0112 sq km in ten days. Which, if any, of them was the man-eater is anybody's guess. Each of the hunters claimed that it was his, thus getting a free permit not only for the tiger he shot but for free hunting for another year.

In recent years cases of man-eaters have also been reported from Uttar Pradesh. The last record of a tigress killing a man in Corbett National Park was in February 1967. The man was a member of a team of fourteen who were marking trees, and he was seized and dragged into a bush. Shikaris who found the body removed it to open ground and set up a machan, and when the tigress returned to it in the evening she was shot. A post-mortem revealed that two of her canine teeth were broken off to one-third of the normal size, an upper molar was loose, and four incisors were missing. This would seem to have been an old tigress, although age should not necessarily have caused her to kill a man for food, and this was her first victim.

Until recently almost every tiger living in the Sundarbans of Bengal was known as a man-eater ! No one had the patience, or even cared to investigate the circumstances to verify whether a person's death was by accident or deliber-ate murder, but everyone added to the horrifying tales of man-eaters. One told of how a man dreamed of a tiger and at the same moment a tiger jumped into the channel and picked up the man from beneath the wooden cover of his boat. just how anyone would know about the dream if the man was killed is not told, but the story caught the fancy of an artist who portrayed the horrifying scene. A. B. Choudhari reports that at the beginning of the present century moo to iso people used to be killed by tigers every year as against approximately 38 annually in more recent years in the Sundarbans, most of the victims being honey-collectors.

I went to the Sundarbans to study the habitat and behaviour of the man-eaters and I found that honey-collectors disturb the entire forest. In their search for bees they often almost bump into sleeping tigers in the dense cover — the men are either looking up into the trees or down at their feet to avoid stumbling — and the surprised animals attack the intruders out of fear and in self-defence. Also, the honey-collecting season coincides with the breeding season, and a tigress will naturally attack a man who comes too close to her cubs. My investigations showed that many tigers seen by woodcutters, fishermen, boat- Reply