Posted on 05/21/2022 4:39:10 AM PDT by The_Media_never_lie
Deforestation, Poaching, and White People Created the Man-Eater of Champawat
In the first decade of the 20th century, the most prolific serial killer of human life the world has ever seen stalked the foothills of the Himalayas. A serial killer that was not merely content to kidnap victims at night and dismember their bodies, but also insisted on eating their flesh. A serial killer that, for the better part of ten years, eluded police, bounty hunters, assassins, and even an entire regiment of Nepalese Gurkhas.
A serial killer that happened to be a Royal Bengal tiger.
Specifically, a tiger known as the Man-Eater of Champawat. Far more than an apex predator that occasionally included humans in its diet, it was an animal that—for reasons that wouldn’t become apparent until its killing spree was over—explicitly regarded our species as a primary source of food. And to that end, this brazen Panthera tigris tigris hunted Homo sapiens on a regular basis across the rugged borderlands of Nepal and India in the early 1900s with shocking impunity and an almost supernatural efficacy. In the end, its reported tally added up to 436 human souls—more, some believe, than any other individual killer, man or animal, before or since.
(Excerpt) Read more at lithub.com ...
Tiger’s may have killed Jim Thompson, a Thai silk magnate. Either that or a tiger pit, with the locals filling it in in fear of legal reprisals.
...hot black coffee...
FR’s Jim Thompson?
Will this coffe ever kick in?
As you point out, predators are losing their fear of disarmed humans.
Without weapons, humans are slow, weak, vulnerable, and tasty prey.
Predators used to be afraid of us because humans would shoot dangerous critters on sight.
Most likely a crippled tiger.
If she can’t catch her normal prey
Humans are easier to catch.
There was a tiger, 436 people eaten, white hunter ends it.
Tigers and leopards eat people. Just read any of Jim Courbet’s books.Most of the man eater tigers Corbett hunted and killed had bad teeth,just old,porcupine quills in their feet or jaws,etc.
One tiger killed over 400 people... That’s as believable as the January 6th insurrection.
Just like some humans the tiger was a serial killer who did it for the adrenaline rush.
Quite true. Hunter Peter Capstick makes the same point.
Kill all the tigers.
Lies lies lies
Everyone knows tigers eat Frosted Flakes.
“Humans….they’re greaaaaaaat!”
This explains why that Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip is gone.
“Too late, Calvin realized that he should have been playing with a puppy.”
Governor Cuomo personally ordered COVID-positive people into nursing homes across the state, killing about 10,000 people, to say nothing of other actions of government leaders which killed tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, or maybe even hundreds of millions. Why aren’t the actions of government agents included in this article?
Yet at the turn of the twentieth century, a change so profound and upsetting to the natural order was occurring in Nepal and India as to cause one such tiger to not only lose its inborn fear of humans altogether, but to begin hunting them in their homes on an all but weekly basis—“
If the above is true why wasn’t there an absolute uncontrollable holocaust of tiger victims? Was there only one tiger?
Heck, Fauxi killed that many every morning before breakfast!
Good grief. Good story, terrible article. Writing well is hard. This writer proves it in spades.
LOL, that sounds so much like a Far Side cartoon!
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