Post by Deleted on Oct 14, 2021 22:11:45 GMT
A little thread dedicated to kings of the man-eaters, the Big Cats, both in fact and fiction.
Lets start with the greatest of them all, The Champawat Man-Eater.
The Champawat Man-Eater has the highest kill count attributed to any single animal. She was a female Bengal tiger responsible for an estimated 436 deaths in Nepal and the Kumaon division of India, during the last years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century.
Now I'm shore your wondering, is that number correct? A good question. Well while some are sceptical and exact records from that time are few and far between, research on the subject suggests a tiger requires a meal roughly the size of a boar, or human, every week. With that in mind, it's entirely possible for a tiger who is predating on humans to rack up a body count that high in the near 10 year reign of terror the Champawat had. A tiger in 1997 was reported to have killed 100 children in the span of 5 months. Then you factor in the cultural superstitions around man-eaters and the general reluctance to report such events, for fear of bringing their wrath down on the person who dares to speak, any you see that the number could even have been higher. What allowed things to get this bad was likely due to the remote location the tiger hunted in, it was quite literally out of sight, out of mind for the ruling classes, with many viewing such things as just local problems.
According to Peter Byrne, professional hunter and author from Nepal, the tiger began her attacks in a Rupal village in western Nepal, Himalayas. Hunters were sent in to kill the tiger, but she managed to evade them. Eventually, the Nepalese Army was called in. Despite failing to capture or kill the tiger, soldiers organised a massive beat and managed to force the tiger to abandon her territory and drive her across the border (river Sarda) into India, where she continued her killing activities in the Kumaon District. The tiger would adjust her hunting strategy so as to best hunt and evade humans; traveling great distances between villages (as much as 32 kilometres (19.8 miles) in a day, undertaken at night) in her new territory both to claim new victims and evade pursuers; her behaviour becoming more like a Amur (Siberian) tiger in her habits and creating a larger territory to encompass multiple villages in the Kumaon area, with Champawat being close to the centre of her territory. Most of her victims consisted of young women and children, as they were the ones most at risk due to their routine of going into the forest to collect resources for feeding livestock, collecting firewood, and crafting. All her kills happened during the daylight (as Corbett writes, he is not aware of a single case of a man-eating tiger killing a human during the night). Life across the region grew paralyzed, with men often refusing to leave their huts for work after hearing the tiger's roars from the forest.
In 1907, the tiger was killed by British hunter Jim Corbett. The tiger had killed a 16-year-old girl, Premka Devi, in the village of Fungar, near to the town of Champawat, and left a trail of blood, which Corbett followed. After nearly getting ambushed by the tiger while investigating the remains of its victim and scaring her off with two shots from his rifle, Corbett had to abandon the hunt, deciding to use villagers and to organize a beat the next day in the Champa River gorge.
With the help of the tehsildar of Champawat, the beat was organized with about 300 villagers, and the next day, about noon, Corbett shot the tigress dead. Corbett's first shots hit the tigress in the chest and shoulder, and his last shot, made with the tehsildar's rifle to keep it from charging him after he ran out of bullets, hit her in the foot, causing it to collapse 6 m (20 ft) from him.
A postmortem on the tigress showed the upper and lower canine teeth on the right side of her mouth were broken, the upper one in half, the lower one right down to the bone. This injury, a result of an old gunshot, according to Corbett, probably prevented her from hunting her natural prey, and hence, she started to hunt humans. Further examinations made by Corbett during his hunt for the tiger indicated that she was in healthy condition physically (other than her teeth) and was between 10 and 12 years old.
Lets start with the greatest of them all, The Champawat Man-Eater.
The Champawat Man-Eater has the highest kill count attributed to any single animal. She was a female Bengal tiger responsible for an estimated 436 deaths in Nepal and the Kumaon division of India, during the last years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century.
Now I'm shore your wondering, is that number correct? A good question. Well while some are sceptical and exact records from that time are few and far between, research on the subject suggests a tiger requires a meal roughly the size of a boar, or human, every week. With that in mind, it's entirely possible for a tiger who is predating on humans to rack up a body count that high in the near 10 year reign of terror the Champawat had. A tiger in 1997 was reported to have killed 100 children in the span of 5 months. Then you factor in the cultural superstitions around man-eaters and the general reluctance to report such events, for fear of bringing their wrath down on the person who dares to speak, any you see that the number could even have been higher. What allowed things to get this bad was likely due to the remote location the tiger hunted in, it was quite literally out of sight, out of mind for the ruling classes, with many viewing such things as just local problems.
According to Peter Byrne, professional hunter and author from Nepal, the tiger began her attacks in a Rupal village in western Nepal, Himalayas. Hunters were sent in to kill the tiger, but she managed to evade them. Eventually, the Nepalese Army was called in. Despite failing to capture or kill the tiger, soldiers organised a massive beat and managed to force the tiger to abandon her territory and drive her across the border (river Sarda) into India, where she continued her killing activities in the Kumaon District. The tiger would adjust her hunting strategy so as to best hunt and evade humans; traveling great distances between villages (as much as 32 kilometres (19.8 miles) in a day, undertaken at night) in her new territory both to claim new victims and evade pursuers; her behaviour becoming more like a Amur (Siberian) tiger in her habits and creating a larger territory to encompass multiple villages in the Kumaon area, with Champawat being close to the centre of her territory. Most of her victims consisted of young women and children, as they were the ones most at risk due to their routine of going into the forest to collect resources for feeding livestock, collecting firewood, and crafting. All her kills happened during the daylight (as Corbett writes, he is not aware of a single case of a man-eating tiger killing a human during the night). Life across the region grew paralyzed, with men often refusing to leave their huts for work after hearing the tiger's roars from the forest.
In 1907, the tiger was killed by British hunter Jim Corbett. The tiger had killed a 16-year-old girl, Premka Devi, in the village of Fungar, near to the town of Champawat, and left a trail of blood, which Corbett followed. After nearly getting ambushed by the tiger while investigating the remains of its victim and scaring her off with two shots from his rifle, Corbett had to abandon the hunt, deciding to use villagers and to organize a beat the next day in the Champa River gorge.
With the help of the tehsildar of Champawat, the beat was organized with about 300 villagers, and the next day, about noon, Corbett shot the tigress dead. Corbett's first shots hit the tigress in the chest and shoulder, and his last shot, made with the tehsildar's rifle to keep it from charging him after he ran out of bullets, hit her in the foot, causing it to collapse 6 m (20 ft) from him.
A postmortem on the tigress showed the upper and lower canine teeth on the right side of her mouth were broken, the upper one in half, the lower one right down to the bone. This injury, a result of an old gunshot, according to Corbett, probably prevented her from hunting her natural prey, and hence, she started to hunt humans. Further examinations made by Corbett during his hunt for the tiger indicated that she was in healthy condition physically (other than her teeth) and was between 10 and 12 years old.
