Book Review

[GuateGojira]

Good idea @Dr Panthera. I don't have the full book yet, only the full chapters of the tiger and the lion, and a few single pages.

On the positive side, I can say that the data is accurate and summarize most of the modern documents. About tigers, it take in count the modern feeding studies quoting the range of 60-250 kg from Hayward et al. (2012) and the social behavior take in count the paper of the male tiger in the tiger society. It also discuss the subspecies issue and present the new idea that only two subspecies actually exist, but overall, it is just a summary and did not quote direct sources, I found them because I have read those papers before. I think it is a positive chapter that gives new fresh air in some points about this cat, but we most remember that all this data is in only 9 pages, so from my point of view, the book of 2002 from the Sunquist is still, the maximum about the great cats, and particularly the tiger. In this book, Dr Hunter shows that there are no breeding evidence of tigers in all Indochina, expect from some few areas of Thailand, Burma and Malaysia, this is a sad true that have been ignored by many "popular" books and internet webpage that still quote the baseless figure of 1,500 for this population/subspecies.

The negative side is directly the morphological department. I have found that the body measurements are based entirely in the table about tigers from Sunquist & Sunquist (2002), and he STILL quote the head-body length for lions and tigers of 250 and 300 cm respectively. From my point of view, I think it is a shame that at this day, there are modern books that still quote such ridiculous sizes. On the weights, he quotes the maximum figure of 272 kg for the lion (obviously from Nowell & Jakcson-1996) and the figure of 261 kg of the Nepalese male. He make the mistake in saying that the weight of 325 kg is from captive tigers, specially when we know that the figure came from a wild Amur male tiger reported by Baikov (Sunquist & Sunquist, 2002). Sadly, the figure of "over 270 kg" from the two Nepalese tigers from Dr Dinerstein is not in a "wild-cat" book but in a "Rhino-book", so very few people in the cat-field know it.

Finally, in the skull department, it seems that he used the document of Yamaguchi et al. (2009) about the cranial volume of tigers and lions like a source for the great cats, which is good in many ways. Sadly, when we examine the tiger, we found that the maximum figure is of 379 mm, which shows that he ignored the figures of Mazák (1983) which constitute a big mistake from his part.

I think that such a large book can't be judged by a single or two chapters, but it will be good what changes present in comparison with the book of 2002 from the Sunquist. By the way, I have the book of 2014 from the same authors (The Wild Cat Book), but I can only say that is a faint shadow in comparison with they opera prima of 2002. It is even shorter in content that the book of Dr Hunter. Reply