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

[GuateGojira]

From what I read here, Kenneth Anderson seems to "like" dholes. He describe them with care like no other description that I have read. Probably, this same way to see them could deviate his statements, in a first observation.

He seems to have saw only "one" of those reports, while his descriptions are based in the testimonies of others. Probably, in this area, dholes have some mythical aura on them.

At the end, the possibility of dholes killing tigers can't be ruled out, however I found very hard to think in a pack of dholes, at any number, killing a healthy tiger.

In this case, Mazák (1981) offers a plausible explanation:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Dholes "could" kill only ill or otherwise weakened tigers. This fact seems confirmed from the Russian Far East, where is well known that tigers suppress packs of wolves, which are larger and more powerful (although less numerous) than any dhole.

Old accounts like those of Kenneth Anderson seems reliable in a normal context, however, sometimes those accounts are not as accurate as we can think. Dr Karanth refer to this event:

*This image is copyright of its original author

 

*This image is copyright of its original author

 

*This image is copyright of its original author

 He (Dr Karanth) is very humble saying that his experience is "limited", especially when he spend more time in the forest that any hunter, plus his observations are not anecdotal but from a scientific point of view. In this case, I think that Dr Karanth made a good point on the exaggeration issue of hunters and the use of evolutionary logic.

Other thing, as far I remember, none of the accounts described the age, the health or the physical state of the tigers, which is crucial in the account/fight. One say "female", the other say "male", but in the old tales, hunters never had a good method to estimate the age of tigers and size is not a good method. Remember the young subadult male tiger T-104 from Nepal, captured by Dr Sunquist, that was as large as an adult male and had the same size than adult tigers, for example (yes, someone could point out that he weighed a lot less than an adult male, but if we judge him just by its size, like the witnesses, the animal was already large, with 289 cm in total length straight). As far we know, that "tigress" could be just a young female of 2-3 years old and the "large" male in the JBNHS report too.

Lastly, a final scientific opinion on the issue:

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

Mazak statement seems to be the most unbiased and give some credit to the old stories, but like Dr Karanth and Dr Tiwari, I now accept that those old accounts seems too suspicions to accept them just like that, especially when in almost 50 years of modern scientific studies, there is not a single case of dholes attacking (not the say killing) any tiger, while on the other hand, there are several cases, scat and kill evidence, of tiger (and even leopard's) predation over dholes.

Something say to me that the old stories of tigers killed by dholes are the same ones of tigers over 4 m long in Russia. None of them entirely confirmed, or the same story repeated over and over again with slight changes, and all of them colored with local exaggeration.

Maybe the modern India is not like the old one, but now seems that the tiger is the undisputed winner in this conflict.
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