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.
In terms of ability to kill humans, five felid species top the list. Four of them are big cats that belong to the genus Panthera, in the subfamily Pantherinae: in order of danger to humans, these are tigers, lions, leopards and jaguars. These could be dubbed the ‘roaring fours’ as the ability to roar is one of the distinguishing features of the genus Panthera, the lion being the loudest. The sole so-called small cat to pose a significant threat to people is the cougar (an animal of many names) that is classified as genus Puma, in the subfamily Felinae. Just because they can and do kill people, however, does not mean they are necessarily doing so for food. Other motives can be defence of territory and protection of young. Tigers, in particular, are frequently known to attack and kill people and simply leave the body alone. Although the phrase ‘man-eating’ (fill in the animal and species of your choice) is commonplace in sensationalist media reports, it’s a mistake to think that all lions or tigers fit the category. It is also a mistake to think there is no such thing. A certain small percentage of these animals do earn such a title by repeatedly attacking and killing humans for food. ‘Man-eating’ lions may be the very stuff of nightmares and horror films, but they are real.
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.
The man who shot the Tsavo lions, Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, was the type model of the ‘Great White Hunter’. He made a tidy sum by writing a book detailing his exploits, and then topped up the profits by selling the lions’ skins to the Chicago Field Museum for $US5000, which in 1924 was a small fortune. It’s possible he had slightly inflated the numbers of people these lions had killed, but the skins bore out his testimony that both of the Tsavo lions were close to 3 metres long from muzzle to tail tip: as big as a tiger! The audience for such stories constantly renews itself and in the 1990s, almost a century after the attacks, a movie was released based on the events, The Ghost and the Darkness.
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.
After several groups tried and failed to locate the right animal, the ‘man-eater of Mfuwe’ was eventually shot by Chicago conservationist – hunter Wayne Hosek, much to the relief of the locals, including the remaining lionesses: six of their sisters had been shot in the mistaken belief that they might have been the perpetrator. This hunting was auspiced under the Luangwa Integrated Resource Development Project, which has had remarkable success in reducing poaching and enhancing wildlife conservation at the same time as improving economic and social conditions for local people. In terms of dealing with interspecies conflict, this approach of controlled, sanctioned shooting may be the way of the future. (See ‘Can you have your lamb and lion too?’, opposite.)
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.
It’s the same problem, over and over again. Predator species require prey species and large territories. Humans herd prey species and require even larger territories. Inevitably there is conflict. And while individual humans may suffer genuine loss, sometimes catastrophic loss, the predators are, overall, even worse off. All of the dangerous wild cat species are compromised, and the tiger is critically endangered in much of its former range. Driven by the demands of our most primitive fears, we look set to win the most pyrrhic of all victories against the wild cats. Before it’s entirely too late, it might be worth asking ourselves: even if they can kill us, do we really want to live on a planet without them? Some useful answers may come from researchers working in the relatively new field of interspecies conflict.
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.
Sadly, the tigers’ light burns very low today. And there are so few forests left. Tigers ( Panthera tigris) are strictly Asian animals and the common names of eight alleged subspecies sound like a roll call of places where they used to thrive in the wild: Balinese, Sumatran, Javanese, Indochinese, South Chinese, Bengal, Siberian and Caspian tigers. Little more than a hundred years ago there were up to 100,000 tigers spread out across the whole of this extensive range. Now, at least three of the subspecies are considered extinct: the Caspian tiger ( Panthera tigris virgata), Balinese tiger ( Panthera tigris balica) and Javanese tiger ( Panthera tigris sondaica). Others are nearing extinction. The South China tigers ( Panthera tigris amoyensis) have fewer than 30 or 40 individuals left in the wild. Forty years ago they numbered in the thousands, but during the reign of Mao Zedong a bounty was put on their head and the stark result is almost certain extinction.
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.
In countries where there are radical extremes of both wealth and poverty, the huge profit margins from poaching will always be a temptation. And extreme inequity is always accompanied by its shadow: corruption. Poachers have nothing to lose by being ruthless about life, either human or other animal. Tiger teeth, claws, skins, live cubs can all be sold on the black market. The animal itself is so mysteriously powerful and beautiful that long ago people concluded that they would very much like to partake in that power. It was hoped that by owning various parts of a tiger there would be a magical transference of the animal’s essence. In some recent instances, though, this hideous but thorough economy has escalated into extreme waste. In certain areas, poachers have been known to abandon tiger skins in the forest because the bones were easier to conceal and could fetch more instant cash, with less trouble than hiding and selling off the skins. One tiger reserve in Rajasthan lost all eighteen of its tigers to poachers over a six-month period in 2004, due largely to corruption and mismanagement. Even zoos offer no guarantee of sanctuary. In 2000 a one-year-old female tiger was killed and skinned at a zoo in Hyderabad. Four zoo employees were suspended, and more were implicated in the crime.
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?
Unlike the tigers, which never set paw in Africa, one species of lion dwells in Africa while another subspecies remains in Asia. Compared with tigers, the African lion ( Panthera leo) population is in a less precarious position. Still, the same story of falling population applies. Conservative estimates of African lion numbers in the first decade of this century are between 16,500 and 30,000, which represents a drop of between one-third and two-thirds of the population alive at the start of the 1990s. This is considered a sufficiently serious problem for the African lion to be classified as ‘vulnerable’ according to the IUCN classification scheme.
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.
In contrast, the African lions are significantly more successful at the killing game. The lion is a superbly equipped predator. Light-boned and muscular, it embodies the perfect balance of opposite forces. The lion’s heavy forepaws can break a spine with one blow; the pads in that forepaw are very fleshy so it can tiptoe (literally—the lion is a digitigrade walker) quietly up to its prey. Hunting is a precisely orchestrated activity, most efficiently carried out by lionesses, which are lighter and less hampered by the big hairdo of the male. Once satiated, the lion rests in the lordly manner that earned it the title King of the Beasts everywhere in the world bar Korea. A pride can rest on their hunting laurels for four or five days before needing to hunt again. Each lion may account for the death of fifteen to twenty large herbivores a year, which is not enough to make much of a dent in the population of these species.
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.
Despite its fearsome capacities as a hunter, the lion is not immune to multiple threats to its existence. It leads a relatively short life in the wild (averaging twelve years in comparison with sixteen or so years in good zoo conditions). Apart from poaching and habitat loss, the lion population is declining dramatically due to diseases, including canine distemper, tuberculosis, feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) and HIV.
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.
Like all large predators, the cougars suffered population drops and reduction of range as the human population expanded throughout the United States and Canada during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the close of that century, though, wildlife policies had become much more conservation-oriented, and the cougar was subject to a shift in status, from a pest species with a bounty on its head to one that can only be hunted under restricted conditions. In California, it is a protected species. The resulting upswing in the cougar population and their return to some of their former haunts has, predictably, received mixed responses from the public. On the one hand, it is counted as one of the more cheerful conservation stories. In an era of severe and multiple environmental threats, it is heartening to many to hear some good news.
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.
Indisputably, though, the numbers of fatal cougar attacks have risen since the 1990s. Wildlife ecologist, Professor Paul Beier made it his business to find out exactly how many people had been killed by cougars in North America, including Canada, over a 100year period starting from the last decade of the nineteenth century. Most of the time, people can walk right by concealed cougars and not even suspect their presence. Sometimes, hikers or campers will sight a cougar. On even rarer occasions, the cougar will attack a human outdoors, sometimes even near dwellings and in residential areas. But in 1951 a telephone linesman inside his remote cabin must have really drawn the short straw statistically when a cougar actually leapt through a closed window to attack him. He survived the experience, as do most adults who have run-ins with cougars.
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.
Unless the cougar is rabid, however, it will almost certainly back off in the face of strong opposition. Plenty of people have chased them off with sticks or stones. And some have managed this just by standing their ground and shouting. It’s a shame Chicago officials didn’t have this information to hand (or at the very least a tranquilliser gun) when they confronted a cougar wandering the streets of their city in April 2008. In what could be seen as a rather drastic response, the animal was gunned down in a hail of bullets. Shades of John Dillinger! Must be the way they still do business in Chicago. It’s remotely possible that the unfortunate animal may have travelled some thousand kilometres from its natural range in search of a mate, but it is far more likely to have been a pet that got too hard to handle, and either escaped its handler or was dumped. Either way it certainly had to be removed from city streets near a school, but was it really necessary that the removal method be so permanent? (In stark contrast, a month later Malaysian Department of Wildlife and National Parks officers went to Segamat, Johor, and managed to relocate two rogue elephants that had been terrorising local villagers using the simple expedient of a tranquilliser gun.)
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
There is something strangely compelling in the brief history of the big cats of the so-called New World. Fantastic rumours must have reached Europe from the first travellers to reach the shores of Africa and Asia and return. Talk of strange, terrifying creatures straight from myth or story or some vague race memory of earlier creatures such as the cave lion ( Felis spelea), which dwelt in the British Isles during the Neanderthal era. During the long reign of European colonialism patriots and expatriates talked of giant cats that could devour humans. Such talk occasioned barely concealed shudders of visceral delight (the seventeenth-century thrill equivalent to watching horror movies). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the grandiose figure of the Great White Hunter stalked across the Western imagination, and there was much slaughter and trophy collecting. Throughout the twentieth century his day gradually waned, and the big cats were re-cast as objects of conservation. But the lust to collect was simply transferred to live animals.
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.
Numbers don’t quite convey the human cost. At seventeen, Haley Hilderbrand was poised on the edge of adulthood, her whole life to come. A decision to have her senior photograph taken with two cute tiger cubs took that future from her. Instead of cubs, for reasons unknown, the facility brought out a very large Siberian tiger on a simple leash, with fatal results. After Haley was attacked and killed, the tiger was shot. Haley will not be forgotten, though, because her name is attached to the proposed US federal legislation to protect against such senseless tragedies by prohibiting direct contact between visitors and animals. Although several American states have already enacted such bans to good effect, states such as Florida continue to be highly unregulated and consequently to have correspondingly high numbers of big cat ‘incidents’.
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
Perhaps the love – hate ratio has always been more finely balanced for the big cat species. Certainly it seems almost commonplace for former big cat hunters to turn into conservationists. Perhaps they are all just following the shining example of one of the earliest and most famous, Jim Corbett. Born in India of Irish ancestry, Corbett is no relation to the heavyweight boxer of the same name, who was more widely known as ‘Gentleman Jim’. Yet Edward Jim Corbett most certainly deserved that title, too. In conservation circles, he was without doubt a heavyweight.
At the age of ten he began his hunting career by shooting a leopard. In the ensuing years he developed a great proficiency at hunting, being by all accounts both brave and skilful. In later years, he preferred to operate alone, although he spent some time as a hunting guide. It was this occupation that eventually shifted his perspective on hunting. The senseless massacre of more than 300 waterfowl by a party he was leading made him vow to give up the so-called ‘sport of kings’. His youthful passion for hunting was superseded by a love of photography and a dedication to the conservation of wildlife and the habitat needed to sustain them.
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.