From The Wall Street Journal:
According to Dane Huckelbridge, a little more than 100 years ago in India and Nepal a “prolific serial killer . . . stalked the foothills of the Himalayas.” Marauding with “shocking impunity” and “almost supernatural efficacy” for nearly a decade, the murderer evaded “police, bounty hunters, [and] an entire regiment of Nepalese Gurkhas.” Before its trail of death came to a violent end in 1907, the monster killed—and ate—436 men, women and children, “more, some believe, than any other individual killer, man or animal, before or since.” Mr. Huckelbridge tells the tale of this “Beowulfian” assassin in his well-written, informative and at times thrilling new book, “No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History.”
The Champawat man-eater was a Bengal tiger, a creature with “innate predatory gifts . . . infinitely superior to our own.” Perfectly camouflaged and stalking on “silent, padded feet,” Bengal tigers are capable of bursts of speed of up to 40 miles an hour and generally weigh 400 to 500 pounds. The kinetic impact of their “blindingly fast” surprise attacks can snap necks and crush ribs. Once latched onto their prey, these tigers rake their victims with 3- to 4-inch flesh-shredding claws and bite with fangs that pulverize bones. Accounts document hungry Bengal tigers “ripping 15-foot crocodiles to pieces, tearing the heads off 20-foot pythons, and dragging 300-pound harbor seals out of the ocean.” When prey isn’t plentiful, they have killed and eaten rhinoceroses and elephants.
One species is “notably and thankfully absent” from the Bengal tiger’s usual diet—our own. For all their lethal magnificence, Bengal tigers under “normal circumstances” don’t prey on humans. But by the early years of the 20th century the circumstances on the Indian subcontinent had diverged far from normal. According to Mr. Huckelbridge, the Champawat tiger’s rampage was the result of “a full century of disastrous ecological mismanagement in the Indian subcontinent that drove [the tiger] out of the wild forests and grasslands it should have called home.” Seen in that light, the Champawat tiger, and the people it killed, were the victims—as was India itself.
By the time the Champawat tiger killed and ate its first human around the turn of the 20th century, British colonists had been in India for nearly 300 years. The colonial administration had spent the last of those three centuries pillaging the country’s natural resources “on a massive, multifaceted scale,” clearcutting forests and putting immense tracts of wildland to the plow. The availability of unspoiled natural habitat to tigers in the lowland jungles and grasslands of India and Nepal plummeted. Prey populations shriveled. In the endless struggle among tigers to hold ever more scarce habitat, wounded or physically impaired tigers couldn’t compete with stronger animals. Many lesser tigers took to preying on human beings.
For seven or eight years, as the Champawat man-eater eluded all extermination attempts, its tally of human victims increased by about one a week. The tiger’s relentless predations forced the abandonment of entire villages. One man lost his wife and both his sons to the monster. Finally, in 1907, the British colonial government tasked an obscure railroad employee with ending the Champawat tiger’s reign of terror: Jim Corbett, the fascinating hero of Mr. Huckelbridge’s tale.
. . . .
Corbett had little interest in hunting tigers, but he also recognized that it was his duty to try and rid the hill people of a bloodthirsty menace. To avoid having himself “mistaken for either a pompous aristocrat bagging tigers for fun, or as a desperate poacher looking to make a few rupees,” Corbett required that the government recall all other hunters pursuing the tiger and withdraw the bounty it had put on the tiger’s life before he would hunt the man-eating cat.
The final confrontation between Corbett and the murderous tiger is as exciting in Mr. Huckelbridge’s account as it was in Corbett’s own memoir, “Man-Eaters of Kumaon” (1944), which sold more than half a million copies in its first two years in print.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
PG notes that, when he checked, the book reviewed in the OP was the #1 bestseller on Amazon’s Cats, Lions & Tigers Biology list, something he hadn’t known existed prior to learning about Mr. Corbett’s experiences with the Champawat man-eater.
And Jim Corbett’s own accounts of his experiences with Bengal tigers:
There’s nothing like reading Corbett’s adventures (and misadventures) with large predators to remind the reader that she is not the top of the food chain. And that luck can be better then skill (although skill can save you from stupidity – the episode with the nightjar nest comes to mind.)