ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris)

[Rishi]

(01-16-2019, 08:40 AM)Wolverine Wrote: Obviously dholes on that video are trying to irritate the tiger.

So, we already have 2 different videos, showing how small packs of dholes briefly encircle tigers. They stay at distance 5-6 meters from the cat. In the moment the tiger rush towards one of the dholes the dhole run away, than the dholes again encircle the tiger until finally all dogs move away. Probably if the tiger is very sick or very old they could dare to attack him but this are only speculations. We still didn't have any video from India showing real attack or bites as we have with spotted hyenas and lions in Africa. 

Could be observed two extreme opossite opinions about dholes- Kipling and Karanth:

1. According Kipling dhole packs are something like supreme killing machine attacking Indian jungles as avalanche and destroing everything on its way, chasing and killing tigers with some suicidal passion to make heroical victory on the giant cat.
2. According famous Indian biologist Ulios Karanth the dholes are just small dogs who never dare to challenge a tiger and are often killed and hunted by tigers. All that old stories about extreme ferosity of the dholes are just legends and nothing more.
Probably the truth is somewhere in between, who knows. Its true that Karanth is biologist while Kipling was not, but in same time Karanth should also not place under suspicion and ignore the observations of Keneth Anderson, who was not less experienced than him in the jungle life.

(01-16-2019, 09:55 AM)GuateGojira Wrote: Little question, how many events between tigers and dholes witnessed Mr Anderson?

From the other side, Dr Karanth, Dr Chundawat and others had witnessed more events and in all the cases the tiger dominate. Remember that in these days there are still groups of up to 15 dholes, but the problem is how many are "adults" and how many are large "cubs". I think that Dr Karanth is correct in suspect the event recorded by Mr Anderson.

I do think that a weak/ill tiger/lion can be attacked and maybe killed by packs of dogs, like Mazák stated, but certainly that will not be the norm and modern evidence do not support the old claims.

One big factor!

These are all very very small packs.
Large packs of upto 40 dholes are near non-existent nowadays. Karanth & Chundawat are from an era when India's wildlife was going through its darkest times. Dholes were lucky to have escaped being critically endangered themselves!

But it was the consensus amongst most of Indian forest personell & hunters pre-1950, not just Kipling, & still is actually. Kenneth Anderson has written about quite a few encounters between dhole packs and tigers. I've read two, atleast 20 adults in both cases. That's an extraordinary sight today...
But hopefully their packs will reach those sizes someday again. They have less intra-pack dominance conflict, lax social hierarchy compared to wolves & multiple breeding females.

This video had the max number of them, about a dozen only. It's a scene from "The Pack" documentary.
http://www.arkive.org/dhole/cuon-alpinus/video-11b.html

http://www.arkive.org/dhole/cuon-alpinus/video-11b.html
@sanjay just typing the ^link isn't working for some reason! It's just a link to the same post (see the codes for both). Reply