killed per year between 1979 and 1998, to 7.2 killed per year between 1998 and 2006. This rise was due largely to dramatic growth in the human population in Chitwan, from virtually zero in 1973 when the park was established (the families who had lived there were forced to resettle elsewhere), to the nearly 223,260 people living within the park’s new, expanded buffer zone by 1999.† The problem was only exacerbated by grazing restrictions that limited use of communal land, and resulted in more frequent human incursions—often illegal—into forested zones for the collection of grass and leaves to feed livestock. This is all strong evidence of the correlation between the collection of forest resources and tiger attacks, with the majority occurring in the transitional zone where human and tiger habitation overlap, inflicted upon a growing human population actively seeking feed for animals or firewood for their homes.
Even more interesting, however, is what we learn about the tigers. Sixty-one percent of the documented man-eaters occupied severely degraded habitats with low prey densities. Of the 18 problem tigers that researchers were able to examine, 10 had physical impairments like missing teeth or injured paws, with 90 percent of these impaired man-eaters also living in degraded habitats. And of the man-eating tigers that left the forest’s edge and ventured into villages—the sort of desperate behavior the Champawat too would eventually exhibit—virtually all came from degraded habitats, and all were physically impaired. Unusually aggressive non-hunting behavior was also recorded in some of these tigers, meaning they were unwilling to leave a kill even when confronted by humans atop elephants, conduct almost unheard of among normal, wild tigers in healthy habitats. Gurung attributes this aggressiveness to increased competition between tigers for limited territory, and to previous negative encounters with humans, who most likely attempted to chase tigers away from livestock kills so they could salvage the fresh meat for themselves. One of these ultra-aggressive tigers killed five people within a few minutes, and then sat beneath a tree for several hours where a sixth person was hiding, roaring and waiting for them to come down—not the sort of performance one would expect from a famously shy and elusive predator.
But this was the kind of behavior exhibited by the Champawat—an animal that was impaired, coping with a changing environment, and that had very fair reasons for being aggressive toward humans. Its pattern of killing almost certainly followed those of Chitwan’s most aggressive tigers today, as it became accustomed to hunting humans, first on its own territory in the grassy marshes and sal forests, and then later on ours, among grass-thatched huts and mud-walled houses. It would have progressed over time from chance encounters in the deep forest with woodcutters and foragers, to semi-deliberate confrontations on the forest’s edge with grass-cutters and herders, to intentioned kills on the outskirts of villages as farmers worked in their fields or walked into the brush to relieve themselves. As the research shows, the most problematic tigers—those with degraded habitats, physical impairments, and aggressive dispositions—seem to lose their fear of people altogether, and this is precisely what happened in the case of the Champawat. The human settlements that dotted the lowland terai ceased to be places of uncertainty and danger, as they were for most tigers, and instead became a veritable smorgasbord. And once that happened, a slaughter of unprecedented proportions commenced.
While statistical analysis of tiger attacks may provide a solid understanding of the underlying causes, data alone does a poor job of communicating their attendant horrors. Attacks by man-eating tigers, though rare, are exceedingly traumatic, in almost every sense of the word. The death of a loved one is always challenging for families and communities, but it becomes far more so when that cherished individual has been mauled or even completely devoured by a striped, fanged, quarter-ton cat. And again, there are contemporary examples of tiger attacks in India and Nepal that provide some idea—albeit a very unpleasant one—of what the aftermath of a wild tiger attack entails.
In the case of lethal maulings—attacks where the tiger succeeds in killing the victim, but either changes its mind or is chased away before it can feed—there is a small but extant body of medical literature on what those wounds involve. When tigers attack a human not out of self-defense, but as potential food, they generally approach the victim much as they would their usual prey of four-legged ungulates. A hunting tiger is stealthy—it approaches its target crouched low to the ground on silent, padded feet, and it waits with twitching tail until the right moment to strike. When that instant arrives, the ambush is lightning fast, and usually conducted from the side or the rear. There is sometimes an accompanying roar coincident with the initial strike—and at 114 decibels, roughly twenty-five times louder than a gas-powered lawn mower, what a roar it is. The tiger will generally use its ample claws to latch on to the prey around the flanks or shoulders, and then seek to kill it with a bite to the neck. On smaller prey, the tiger is more than capable of severing or damaging the spinal cord—its teeth are well designed to wedge between vertebrae and inflict catastrophic damage on the tender nerve tissue beneath, which it usually accomplishes quickly, and from the nape. On larger prey, tigers will knock over the animal first, then strangulate it with a choking bite to the trachea, possibly severing a jugular vein in the process. Humans generally fall into the first category, and when a tiger hunts our kind, it goes straight for the spine, although it will sometimes knock over the victim with a blow from its paws or the momentum of its body.
Such was the case of an attack that occurred in the Nagpur Division of India, and was subsequently described in Forensic Science International in 2013; an event that bears a striking resemblance to those attributed to the Champawat. The victim, a thirty-five-year-old woman, was foraging for tendu leaves in the forest with her husband and a few companions. The woman was left briefly alone while her husband scaled a tree to pluck leaves right off the branches, when shouts of “tiger, tiger” rang out through the brush. Her husband reached her just a few seconds later, and he was able to scare away the tiger by shouting and hurling stones, but it was too late—she was already dead. When her blood-soaked sari was later removed, and an autopsy performed, the examination revealed “four deep puncture wounds” on the nape of the neck resulting in a “complete laceration of the right jugulocarotid vessel” as well as “compound fractures of the C3 and C6 vertebral bodies due to through and through penetration by the canines of the tiger as a result of enormous bite force used in the killing bite at the canines.” The spinal cord at these points was “completely lacerated with multiple foci of hemorrhages.” In addition to the severed jugular and broken spine, the victim also suffered multiple deep puncture wounds from the tiger’s claws on the arms, shoulders, and torso—some almost two inches wide—as well as a fractured right clavicle and a fracture dislocation of the left sternoclavicular joint from the sheer force of the initial blow. In this case, the death was classified as “accidental,” which although true in a legal sense, doesn’t capture the purposeful nature of a tiger attack. When one sees the heart-wrenching autopsy photo of the four perfectly spaced, quarter-sized holes on the back of the victim’s broken neck, one can’t help but feel tremendous pity for the family of the unfortunate woman, and shudder at the expertise with which a tiger does its deadly work. Not malevolently, as man so often does, but naturally, with the grace and ease that 2 million years of predator evolution have bestowed upon it.
As to how the tiger can kill so effectively and quickly, we need only remind ourselves of the considerable toolkit with which the tiger is equipped. As we already know, tigers have four canine teeth that can reach close to four inches, and they have a total of ten claws on their forepaws of comparable length. This means that in the first milliseconds of a full-speed tiger attack, a human body must not only cope with a bone-fracturing impact comparable to that of a charging Spanish fighting bull, but also absorb fourteen simultaneous stiletto-deep stab wounds—four of which are usually inflicted on the back of the head or the nape of the neck. And that’s just the initial attack. If there’s any fight left in the grievously injured victim, it can usually be obliterated almost instantly with a fierce, spine-snapping shake of the head, or further flaying with all those bladed claws. Not surprisingly, survivors of actual tiger attacks are few and far between.
But they do exist. Oftentimes, victims of tiger attacks survive either because the tiger is scared away before it can finish the job, or because it is acting in a defensive manner and not a predatory one—in which case the attack is geared more toward deterrence than nutrition (although