Tiger - The Ultimate Predator:
1. The tiger's hunting tactics are based on out-thinking the opponent with intelligence and cunning. The final blow is of course delivered with unadulterated brute force. The tiger is faced with a problem of prey with extremely acute senses of smell and also pretty sharp senses of hearing and sight.
2. To counter these assets of its targets, it relies on its prowess at stalking as a lethal weapon. It counters the powerful sense of smell of the would be victim by always approaching from the direction the wind is blowing to.
3. Never from the direction which the wind is blowing from. It counters the hearing powers by making sure each carefully taken step is soundless. The soft pads under its paws ensure this happens. It checks each spot for noisy twigs before it places a foot there, actually brushing them aside if it finds any. To counter sharp eyesight, it uses every possible source of cover to get it as close to the prey before charging it.
4. Its striped pattern helps break up it's outline and it uses this camouflage by freezing instantly whenever the target looks its way. The movements are extremely calculated and precise. There is no sudden movement until the final burst, once it is sure to be within striking distance.
5. Yet, some experts say a tiger's kill success rate is as low as one out of ten attempts. Once it pounces on its prey, the tiger either kills it by snapping the spinal column at the neck as the animal is falling or by suffocating the victim by driving its sharp and long canines into the trachea. The tiger is also well equipped with sharp and retractable claws.
6. These are mostly used for injuring, holding or cutting another animal but the power behind a tiger's slash is enough to kill too. Although the tiger prefers larger prey, it is not uncommon for it to kill small animals like monkeys, specially a mother with cubs.
7. Tigers are excellent swimmers and have been seen using this ability to help them in hunting. This is specially true in the mangrove swamps of the Sunder ban National Park. This lack of fearing water was also time and again demonstrated by some ingenious tigers in Ranthambore National Park who became famous as the "Lake Tigers".
8. The most famous of the lot, named "Chenghis", has been documented swimming out and wrestling kills out of the mouths of large marsh crocodiles. Unfortunately, this technique, although copied by some other tigers of the same era in the late 1980s, did not carry on down the line. The crocs can now eat in peace!
Man-eaters:
1. Under most circumstances, a tiger would rather avoid crossing tracks with man. Man does not feature on the regular diet of a tiger and it is as vary of humans as they are of tigers.
2. The transformation of a tiger into a man-eater begins only when some some factors begin to deprive a tiger of its ability to outwit and overpower it's normal prey. These factors can be quite wide ranging from porcupine quils leading to festering wounds, to poacher's gunshots not completing their job.
3. A tiger is confronted with prey species that have fine-tuned all their senses to detect the approach of a predator before it gets them. They all have excellent hearing and smelling powers, which give them enough of a warning to sprint away from danger.
4.It is due to this that a tiger has to very often cut short its stalk and break into a charge to bring down a fleeing prey. Even with it's incredible powers of stalking and tremendous burst of speed, the tiger only has a success rate of below 20 percent. When a tiger gets injured due to some reason and is unable to perform at it's best, it becomes more and more difficult for it to hunt successfully.
6. It is during this phase that if an injured tiger crosses paths with a human, who results in the latter being killed, it realizes the physical weakness of man and includes him in its menu. Once a tiger loses its fear of man, it is one of the most dangerous animals in the world.
7.They are known to be violently aggressive without reason and definitely pose a threat to the human population in the area. In such cases, they are now captured and put in zoos. It is only in cases where the circumstances are totally unavoidable that man-eaters are shot dead and not captured.
8. As they say, there is always an exception to the rule. This holds true in the case of man-eating tigers as well. In the Sunder ban National Park, within the state of West Bengal, the tigers have evolved with one different aspect in comparison to tigers anywhere else.
9. "Mankind" does feature on the menu of their natural diet. They are known to hunt fishermen in boats and honey collectors in the forests. Many ideas have been implemented here to try and associate man with danger and as something to be avoided. One of these ideas is to set up electrified dummies around the forest to make tiger associate humans with a slightly painful electric shock.
11. There are two opposing schools of thought. One feels that man-eaters can never be made to disassociate man as a natural prey species. Once a man-eater, always a man-eater. The other school of thought feels that this is not really true.
12. They feel that a man-eater can be taught and made to realize that man should not feature on it's regular diet. One of the parks that have tried experimenting with this second school of thought is the Dudhwa National Park in Northern India. The arguments still continue and it is doubtful there will ever be a final conclusion, as it wouldn't be very easy to get volunteers to prove whether a tiger is a man-eater any longer or not!
13. The sad part about man-eaters is that they are responsible to a large extent of the overall image most humans have of tigers. Vicious and mindless killers. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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