Tiger Predation

[Dr Panthera]

(11-08-2015, 07:55 PM)Brehmji Wrote: I agree with Dr. Panthera, even a young elephant is an massive task to cope with. About one year back, i saw a documentary about lion's and buffalo's on the french/german channel "arte", where it was shown how difficult it is to kill even a young elephant. It showed a sequence where the lion pride, which was used to hunt buffalo's most of the time, was forced to switch to elephant's for a short time because the buffalo herd moved to the area of a neighbouring pride. They managed to take down a young elephant of about 5 years, but they couldn't kill him with a throat bite because of the thick skin. After  some time of trying, the lion's decided to eat the elephant alive. The narrator commented also that the featured lion pride had no experience in hunting elephants before. I forgot the location, but i think it was Okavango Delta...

Everyone who had the oppurtunity to touch a elephant will most likely agree, that some (if not even the most) parts of the body feel almost like massive cement!

However, i wouldn't say that (young) elephant's are tougher prey as buffalo's or vice versa. Even if i agree that young elephants are a massive "meat wall" which is harder to kill than bovine's on one hand (due to the reason mentioned), but on the other bovine's are for sure more capable to kill their potential attacker's than juvenile elephant's.

I could imagine that the the claims....
harder to kill -> subadult elephant
higher chances to get killed -> (adult) bovine's
...fit very good to this question.

Killing an adult elephant should be therefore almost impossible for a single predator with no support of a pride. Anyway, i wouldn't dismiss Jim Corbett's report's of tiger's killing adult tusker's as fictional tale's. The long lasting fights where tiger's and elephant's are said to fight the whole night with each other, could be exaggerated, but still could be based on a true happening. It all depends on the way it occured in my opinon. Fighting violently the whole night in a brave face to face combat is of course unlikely...but tiger's for sure have an advantage at night over most of their potential prey. Therefore it isn't fictional at all, if a tiger is capable to deliver heavy wounds, while at the same time he is able to dodge the majority of the elephant's attacks.
And if the tiger attacked in intervall's with break's during the fight -like attacking the elephant once, deliver a deep wound, retreat for a couple of time and repeat it the whole night- chances are high that there is a badly injured elephant the next morning. If not even dead...
That would of course require much skill and experience, but Raja already showed what is possible if a tiger possesesses both...

Absolutely, the Arte documentary you are referring to is " Lions Behaving Badly" as if eating the prey alive is bad behavior!! Cats attempt the killing bite first then eat but if the prey is immobilized and can not move anyway and possesses  dangerous horns and/or tusks than eating it alive from the rump makes perfect sense, the animal will die of blood loss eventually, and practically in most attacks of any solitary cat on a very large animal ( over 1000 LBS or 450 kg ) this what happens.
Young elephants however have childhoods similar to humans, long childhood, protective mothers and aunts, and this protection in a way delays the development of their anti-predator behavior , young bovids on the other hand will need to fight back to survive at an earlier age.
An adult elephant will break the skeleton of a tiger or a lion with one kick or if it tramples the unfortunate predator, the trunk can easily lift 270 kg ( 600 LBS) and throw it away ten meters, with the exception of highly experienced elephant hunting prides in Botswana and Zimbabwe ( Joubert, Loveridge respectively) , predation on elephants over age of ten is almost non existent .
Despite my admiration of Jim Corbett as a pioneer on tiger conservation and a great hunter and writer, the account where he states that villagers told him that two tigers fought an all night long battle with a tusker Asian elephant ( male) that left a dead elephant and wounded tigers can not be seriously taken, I mean consider these points:
1-Second hand account where the first source are "villagers" the same people who could not tell Schaller the difference between a chital stag and a chital doe.
2-A battle at night, in a dense forest, at a time and place in India where there was no electricity or night vision equipment would surely be extremely difficult to witness under moonlight and fire torches.
3-Tusks become visible around age 3 to 4 , so if this was the age category where even a single tiger can kill a calf that age then yes but an adult male wild Asian elephant is more than a match to any tiger or pair of tigers. Reply