8
BIG CAT MAGIC
If they care one way or another, people are just about equally divided between those who love and those who loathe the domestic cat. Non-domestic cats are another matter. All the predators that eat humans inspire terror, by any measure a reasonable response to something that can kill you. Yet only the wild cats also inspire almost universal respect and frequently deep affection. Nobody ever attached the word ‘noble’ to a shark or crocodile. They lack the beautiful pelt, the lustrous eye, the aristocratic tilt of the head that attracts much more than it repels. We are obsessed with cats in the wild, in zoos, in film and book and song, in dream and in reality. The ancient Egyptians are not alone in their worship of cats; but there is a dark side to this worship.
It’s a very small step from worshipping the mystique and power of these animals to desiring to possess such power for ourselves. Sympathetic magic is one of the major drivers of the deadly black market for animal parts. Maybe this tooth, this claw, this skin will transfer the animal’s power to me. Along with habitat loss, the illegal trade in poached animals means we are losing far too many of them. In the case of the wild cats, there are 36 species of big and small wild cats that belong to the family Felidae. Of these, seventeen are threatened and five endangered or critically endangered according to IUCN criteria. In response to effective conservation measures a few populations of wild cat species are thriving, but most are not. This puts us in a strange position. We have been pitted against these predators in a life and death struggle since time immemorial, and until very recent historical times you could say that neither side possessed the capacity to vanquish the other. Hunger is a great motivator. Not only do wild cats eat humans, but all the big carnivores, including humans, have a penchant for pinching each other’s kills, given half a chance. One study in Uganda reported that it is still not uncommon for rural people without firearms to try scavenging from lion and leopard kills. In the reported cases, sometimes the wild cat was driven off, sometimes it was killed, and sometimes the humans lost their lives in the process.
THE TSAVO LIONS
Two of the most notorious of these made headlines around the world in the late nineteenth century. This pair plagued the builders of the Tsavo Railroad Bridge in Kenya. What a thankless task those builders had—working long hours in rough conditions, and subject to nightly death threats by the local carnivores. Over nine months in 1898, an extraordinary number of workers were killed by the maneless Tsavo lions: some claim up to 140 in total. Several reasons have been advanced to account for such persistent preying on humans. An outbreak of rinderpest had greatly reduced the lions’ normal prey. Post-mortem dental examination of the lions revealed disease that may have reduced their normally phenomenal jaw strength, and consequently their ability to prey on huge herbivores. A more macabre hypothesis is that workers who had died from other causes were not given adequate burial, and thus the lions became habituated to the taste of human flesh.
Seen from the distance of more than a century, such stories do seem to attain the status of tall tales and legends. Still, such seemingly mythical man-eaters have not quite vanished into history. In the early 1990s the villagers of Mfuwe in Zambia were beleaguered by another huge maneless lion that killed six people. By all accounts, this lion also dragged a bag of clothes belonging to one of the victims through the village to the river, where it continued to bat it about in play. Anybody who has witnessed a domestic cat toying with a mouse could find it in their hearts to sympathise with the locals, who witnessed this and came to the conclusion that it was a matter of sorcery and evil.
Deliberate predation on humans and death tallies on such a scale are absolutely the exception, yet clearly the people of Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Ethiopia all have reasonable grounds to fear for their lives and livelihoods due to the depredations of lions. Just as the Bhutanese, Bangladeshi, Indian, Burmese and Nepalese people who live near the Sundarbans National Park have reasonable grounds to fear the Bengal tigers that dwell there.
CAN YOU HAVE YOUR LAMB AND LION TOO?
TIGER, TIGER, BURNING LOW
‘Tyger, tyger, burning bright in the forests of the night’: Blake’s immortal words distil the experience of thousands of years of human co-existence with tigers. However uneasy, however endangered we felt, we never dreamt the tigers were not immortal. With good reason, Koreans acknowledge the tiger rather than the lion as the ‘King of Beasts’. The tiger is after all the largest of the cat family. Males are bigger and longer than females, averaging around 3 metres in length from muzzle to tail tip. The average male tiger weighs between 190–200 kilograms, but one formidable beast was recorded at 320 kilograms—three times the weight of a large human male.
In sharp contrast, the Indian government under the leadership of Indira Gandhi responded to recognition of tigers’ endangerment by initiating large scale, ongoing conservation efforts in an attempt to secure the future of their very own Bengal tiger ( Panthera tigris tigris)—the ‘tiger’s tiger’. Starting in 1973, ‘Project Tiger’ created 40 tiger reserves across a range of habitats. This effort was massive, and at first it did have a major positive impact on the tiger population. For a while, the Bengal tiger population seemed to be holding steady and even increasing. There is a wide margin for error, due to disputes about the method of calculation, but it was estimated that largely due to these efforts 3000 to 4000 Bengal tigers still roamed the wilderness between India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Burma and Bhutan at the turn of the century. Unfortunately, more accurate census data from 2008 indicates a far lower figure of between 1300 and 1500 wild tigers left. A depressingly low number, as such small populations are at a much increased risk of decline and extinction. Most other species of tiger have far lower population numbers, so the overall picture for tigers is grim.
Tigers are the most dangerous wild cats for humans. Statistics are not globally comprehensive, but average numbers of fatalities in tiger ‘hotspots’ serve to illustrate. In certain parts of India—Madhya Pradesh, for example—tigers take a small but significant annual toll of a dozen or so people. The highest numbers of tiger attack victims live in or next to the Sundarbans, which lie between India and Bangladesh. The Sundarbans is tiger central, one of the few regions of extensive wild habitat left for the Royal Bengal tiger. An average of 100 people a year are killed, but it’s not ‘equal opportunity’ killing. Experts note that only around 30 per cent of Sundarban tigers are actively aggressive towards humans, and only 10 per cent of the aggressive tigers qualify as dedicated people-eaters. Most tigers much prefer to avoid humans; it’s just getting harder and harder for them to do so.
THE FRANKENSTEIN TIGER
POACHERS PREY ON TIGERS
Judged in the light of this, the underpaid and underequipped guards who continue to devote their lives to tiger protection must have extraordinary courage: both physical and moral. At least 50 guards lose their lives to poachers each year, and twice that many are injured. These guards have phenomenal knowledge of the animals they are protecting, understanding their habits in health and illness, noting their signs of distress. ‘The animals recognise us and stop when we whistle,’ said Bisht who has patrolled the Himalayan jungles for close to 30 years in defence of the tigers and other protected animals. People with his kind of knowledge are almost as endangered as the tigers themselves. Most are in their fifties or older, and there is no incentive for new workers to replace them. The pay and conditions are very poor. Bisht, along with many of his fellow workers, is respectfully cautious of the animals he is protecting, but justifiably lives in far greater fear of the poachers that stalk the animals.
Indian conservationist and naturalist Valmik Thapar has long been an active critic of such corruption and the toll it takes even on the veracity of scientific reports. Since succumbing to the spell of tigers in the 1970s, Thapar has tried every means in his considerable power to fight for their continued existence. Time and time again he has challenged the systematic corruption that augurs so ill for the tigers’ continued existence. He is not optimistic about their long-term survival. If tigers do hold on through the 21st century it will be due to people such as Thapar, and many other wildlife biologists who work ceaselessly to this end. It will also be due, in no small part, to the frontline workers who continue to risk so much for so little material reward.
WONDERING WHERE THE LIONS ARE?
Far worse off, however, is the Asian lion ( Panthera leo persica), a remnant population from the days when the lion roamed a much wider territory across Africa, Eurasia and even North America. Slightly smaller than the African lion, and with a scruffier mane, the Asiatic lion is definitely down on its luck. Only 300 or so of them are left in the wild, all of which can be found in the Gir forest of Gujarat in India. Predictably, interspecies conflict is a major problem. Human fatalities and livestock losses are ongoing problems. For instance, from 1978 to 1991 an average of two people each year were killed by Gir lions. Nonetheless, the Asiatic lion is less of a danger than its African counterpart on an attack-by-attack basis. One study found that only 14.5 per cent of attacks had fatal outcomes.
Very few lions have humans on their list of species killed. A most comprehensive survey of those that do was carried out by researchers Treves and Naughton-Treves in Uganda. They substantiated records of 275 attacks over a 72-year period. Only 25 per cent of the victims survived. At least one-third of the 175 reported fatalities over a fifteen-year period from 1989 were in Tanzania. Another pattern also emerged from their study. Males were more likely to experience being attacked by a lion (given that their daily lives require them to be out hunting themselves); males were also more likely to survive such an attack. Attacks on women and children, though less frequent, were almost inevitably fatal.
COUGARS: THE AKA ANIMAL
Cougars ( Puma concolor) are one of two home-grown wild cats of the Americas, their more southerly counterpart being the jaguar. Although cougars are lighter in weight than jaguars, they still rank as the fourth heaviest feline species in the world. Nonetheless, scientifically speaking they are classed as a small cat. They have had more than one scientific name, formerly being classified as Felis concolor, but that’s nothing compared to the number of common names. Cougars aka pumas aka panthers aka mountain lions aka catamounts aka painters aka mountain screamers. These animals have far more names than the domestic cat has fabled lives: 40 different names in English alone, which is ample evidence of just how big their range was in recent historical times. New neighbourhood, new name.
On the other hand, cougars can and do kill people, most especially children. The death of a child is a tragic and emotional topic, and one that is difficult to place in perspective. Each year 50,000 children die in the United States, according to The National Centre on Child Fatality Review. Although cancer is the leading cause of disease death among children, at least 2000 children die annually from abuse, or to use the chilling Australian term ‘non-accidental injury’. Modern Western cultures tend to insulate against death in all its guises, and death by wildlife seems shockingly primitive and somehow wrong. It is also, to place it in perspective, extraordinarily rare. The animal most likely to kill a child is an adult human.
Beier’s work uncovered the fact that the sum total of verifiable fatalities over a 100-year period was eleven; all bar two were children. One eighteen-year-old, Scott Lancaster, was killed while jogging alone on a trail near his high school in Colorado on 14 January 1991. (Lancaster’s unlucky and untimely demise had a fictional reprise as one of the more unusual death scenes to open an episode of the television cult classic Six Feet Under.) The other adult death was part of a double fatality caused by rabies acquired during the attack. More than half of all the fatal attacks have occurred since the 1970s.
PANTHER UNRAVELLING
LEOPARDS AND JAGUARS
Even combined, the other pair of big cats to make up the ‘roaring fours’ barely match the danger of tigers, lions and cougars. True, some leopards ( Panthera pardus) have been documented ‘maneaters’. The Panar leopard, for instance, allegedly killed at least 400 people in the Kumaon district of northern India in the early years of the twentieth century. Ironically, it only began its career after being injured by a poacher and finding itself unable to hunt its normal prey, or so the story goes. By contrast the Rudraprayag leopard that terrorised the people and pilgrims of Uttarakhand in central India only took 125 people. But this was a decade or so later, and perhaps the figures are more accurate. Both leopards were shot on commission by the legendary Jim Corbett (see the Damascus Awards). Being night hunters, leopards have even been known to sneak indoors and attack sleeping people. These man-eaters are definitely the exception, however. According to J.C. Daniels the number of leopard attacks in India has declined significantly since the beginning of the twentieth century. For their part, leopard populations appear to be holding up better than those of the other big cats, but a number of subspecies are seriously threatened.
The enigmatic jaguar ( Panthera onca) has never been classed as a dedicated man-eater. Hunted out of most of its former range in South America, extinct in Uruguay and El Salvador, gone from the southern United States and northern Mexico, the jaguar’s last refuge is the remaining rainforest of the Amazon basin. On rare occasions the jaguar does kill a human, but it has not been known to do so ‘unprovoked’. As most of its victims tend to be children, it’s important to be clear that ‘provocation’ is not necessarily deliberate or aggressive. Rather, the term applies when something appears a provocation from the animal’s point of view, even if it would not necessarily seem so to a human witness. Although the wild jaguar does not seem to be the most dangerous of the big cats, the jaguar at Melbourne Zoo kept the keepers and the zoo veterinary on their toes by launching itself at the back door of its cage every time they passed by. Perhaps it was just that particular animal, or perhaps the jaguar is less able to adapt to a life in confinement.
REVENGE OF THE POST-COLONIALCARNIVORES: A BRIEF HISTORY OFBIG CATS ABROAD
Now in Europe, in Britain and most of all in the United States there are any number of big cat owners, very few of whom know how to deal with such an animal once it passes from cute cub to full-grown carnivore. Meanwhile, the cats become habituated to humans and lose all fear of them. Inevitably, people then rediscover the fact that these animals can and do kill humans. Even the incomplete number of exotic big cat attacks each year in North America is startling. Since 1990, at least 100 people have been injured by lions and tigers, twelve of them fatally. Compare this with the number of people (ten or twelve) killed by the wild and non-exotic cougar during the entire twentieth century.
EXACTLY WHO IS RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW?
The world’s most endangered big cat is so rare that most people have never even heard of it. The amur, or far eastern leopard ( Panthera pardus orientalis), lives in the remote region between Russia and China, where two, at the most three, dozen of the animals survive in the wild. Amurs used to roam all through north-east China and the Korean peninsula, but now they only linger in this last borderland. And for all the wildlife biologists, conservationists and animal lovers who desperately want them to survive, there are others who do not scruple to kill and further drive the species towards extinction. In 2007 one of only eight healthy adult female amurs was found shot and bludgeoned. She was the third such animal to be killed in the previous five years, most likely by poachers. The struggle for a species’ continued existence does not get much more raw and brutal than this. Part of the problem lies with the sheer amount of high-quality habitat (well stocked with prey species such as deer) that is needed to support key predators such as leopards. According to Dr Dmitry Pikunov of the Russian Academy of Science, each adult male amur requires around 500 square kilometres of territory (that’s over half the size of New York, which is around 800 or so square kilometres), a range which would also support a couple of breeding females and their cubs. To date, the amurs are still breeding, but unless there is significant ongoing habitat protection it is only a matter of time before this beautiful animal disappears altogether.
THE DAMASCUS AWARDS
Throughout his life, though, Corbett was always willing to use his hunting skills when big cats posed a serious threat to human life or livelihood. In this capacity he was responsible for hunting and killing several animals, including the Champawat tigress and the Mohan man-eater in India. These animals are alleged to have killed extraordinary numbers of humans, sometimes numbering more than 1000. Although these wild figures are unlikely to hold up under scientific scrutiny, it remains true that the animals he shot later in life were definitely repeat killers, mainly of women and children. For this reason he was held in very high regard by the local people, some of whom saw him as a sadhu, a holy man.
No one knows what the cats think, but Corbett did much to protect them, too. He founded the All-India Conference for the Preservation of Wildlife. He was responsible for securing the first, and (after additions of land) the largest, national park in India. Corbett National Park in Uttaranchal, India, was renamed in his honour in 1957. Later in his life he lived and worked actively for conservation in Kenya. Altogether, Corbett is not only the archetypal recipient of a Damascus Award, he can be credited with virtually inventing the genre.