There is no shortage of shades or strokes one can employ when it comes to painting a portrait of the Bengal tiger, but to begin: Bengal tigers are big. While females tend to max out close to 400 pounds, adult males regularly achieve body weights in excess of 500 pounds, and some exceptionally large individuals have been documented at weights of over 700 pounds. Royal Bengal tigers, the subset that lives in the sub-Himalayan jungle belt known as the terai, tend to be even bigger. One extraordinary specimen—reportedly also a man-eater, at least until David Hasinger shot it in 1967—weighed in at 857 pounds, measured over 11 feet long, and left paw prints “as large as dinner plates.” For its last supper, it managed to drag not only a live water buffalo into the forest, but also the eighty-pound rock to which it was tethered. The humongous tiger’s man-and-water-buffalo-eating days may have ended shortly thereafter, but it still prowls today—in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, in fact, where it is on permanent display in the Hall of Mammals.
Second: Bengal tigers are fast. In short sprints, they can achieve forty miles per hour, which is almost three times as fast as the average human being, and roughly equivalent to the top speed of a Thoroughbred racehorse. In other words, it is futile to try to outrun a dedicated tiger. And when it comes to their leaping prowess, there are plenty of examples of tigers clearing tremendous hurdles to get their claws on a target. In an incident recorded in Nepal in 1974, a startled tigress protecting her cubs had little trouble mauling a researcher hiding fifteen feet above her in a tree. The aforementioned tiger from Kaziranga National Park managed in 2004 to take three fingers off that unfortunate elephant driver’s hand—a hand that appears to be at least twelve feet off the ground—with barely a running start. And on Christmas Day, 2007, a tiger (Amur, not Bengal, although their abilities are comparable) escaped the ostensibly inescapable barriers of its open-air enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo, for the sole purpose of going after a trio of young men who had provoked its ire. Accounts vary as to what caused the attack—the zoo accused the victims, all of whom had alcohol and marijuana in their systems, of taunting and harassing the animal, something the two survivors vigorously denied. What is certain, however, is that the enraged tiger got across a thirty-three-foot dry moat, cleared a nearly thirteen-foot protective wall, and emerged snarling from the pit like the wrath of God. Police arrived in time to save two of the young men from almost certain death—the third, who received the brunt of the initial attack, was not so lucky—but stopping the crazed tiger proved anything but easy. One officer fired three .40-caliber-pistol rounds into the charging cat’s head and chest, and that only seemed to anger it further. It wasn’t until a second officer put a fourth bullet in the tiger’s skull at point-blank range that it finally ceased its attack and fell to the ground. A more nightmarish scenario is difficult to imagine, but it is at least worth mentioning—this was only a captive tiger. Experienced wild tigers, accustomed to bringing down big game and fighting off territorial rivals, are generally much more athletic and aggressive when their hunting or defensive instincts kick in. A tiger in its natural habitat—alert, attuned, muscles rippling beneath its tawny striped hide—is another creature entirely from the languid, yawning pets of Siegfried & Roy. As lethal as this urbanized West Coast zoo tiger proved to be, it was a flabby house cat compared to its country cousins, ripping apart wolves and chasing down bears in ancient forests across the sea.
Third: Bengal tigers are strong. A tiger’s jaw is capable of exerting around a thousand pounds of pressure per square inch—the strongest bite of any cat. That’s four times as powerful as the bite of the most menacing pit bull, and considerably stronger than that of a great white shark. Even Kodiak bears, which can weigh as much as 1,500 pounds, can’t keep up. The bite of a tiger can shred muscle and tendon like butter and crunch bones like we might a stale pretzel stick. And if their bite is terrifying, a swipe from their retractable claws is just as bad if not worse. A single blow from a Bengal tiger’s paw can crack the skull and break the neck of an Indian bison, and can decapitate a human. Aggressive tigers have been known to rip the bumpers off cars, tear outhouses to splinters, and burst through the walls of houses in search of food. They can drag a one-ton buffalo across a forest floor with ease, and are capable of carrying an adult chital deer by the neck as effortlessly as a mother cat does a kitten. It’s less apparent on an Amur tiger, with its heavy fur and fat reserves, but on a Bengal tiger, the musculature is unmistakable—this is the middle linebacker of the animal world, the perfect melding of power and speed.
And last: Bengal tigers are smart. Predation of almost any kind requires intelligence—a carnivore must discern what prey is ideal, where to find it, and how best to stalk it while evading detection. Tigers excel at all of the above, thanks to skills acquired during a lengthy tutelage with their mothers. Cubs typically stay with their mothers as long as two and a half years, during which, under her ceaseless care, they learn the many, complicated tricks of the trade. And tricks, at least according to some sources, they most definitely are. During the British Raj, hunters took note of tigers that could imitate the sound of the sambar deer—what naturalist and tiger observer George Schaller would later refer to as “a loud, clear ‘pok,’ ” although he admitted to having seldom heard them make the noise while actually hunting. In colder climes to the north and east, there exist tales of tigers imitating the calls of black bears, ostensibly so they could snap their spines and dine on their fat-rich meat. Tigers frequently adjust their attack strategies to fit their quarry, and whether it’s chasing larger animals into deep water where they are easier to kill, snapping the leg tendons of wild buffalo to bring them down to the ground, or flipping porcupines onto their bellies to avoid their sharp quills, tigers are quick studies in the arts of outsmarting their prey. This intelligence, coupled with their innate athleticism and sizable frame, makes for one exceptionally effective natural predator.
Indeed, when one considers the raw physics of a collision with a five-to-six-hundred-pound body moving at forty miles an hour, the equation starts to feel less like one belonging to the natural world, and more akin to that of the automotive. Only this Subaru is camouflaged, all-terrain, and has one hell of a Klaxon—not to mention a grill bristling with meat hooks and steak knives. And when it comes to putting a tiger in its tank, this high-performance vehicle runs almost purely on meat—sometimes as much as eighty-eight pounds of it in one sitting. It has its own favorite sort of prey, the hooved, meaty mammals that graze in its domain. But a hungry tiger will eat almost anything.
Of course, there are the more pedestrian items on a famished tiger’s menu. Turtles, fish, badgers, squirrels, rabbits, mice, termites—the list is long and inglorious. But then there are the more impressive items that a tiger may take as quarry when the conditions are right. In addition to bears and wolves, tigers have been documented ripping 15-foot crocodiles to pieces, tearing the heads off 20-foot pythons, and dragging 300-pound harbor seals out of the ocean surf to bludgeon on the beach. Bengal tigers in northern India are known to have killed and eaten both rhinos and elephants, and while they tend to prefer juveniles for obvious reasons, full-grown specimens of both species have been victims of tiger predation. In 2013, a rash of tiger attacks upon adult rhinos occurred in the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve in northern India, with a 34-year-old female rhino—almost certainly over 3,000 pounds—being killed and eaten. In 2011, a 20-year-old elephant was killed and partially eaten by a tiger in Jim Corbett National Park, and in 2014, a 28-year-old elephant in Kaziranga National Park farther east was killed and feasted upon by several tigers at once. Keep in mind, a mature Indian elephant can weigh well over five tons; the Bengal tigers responsible essentially took down something the size of a U-Haul truck just so they could gnaw on it. Oh, and lest we forget—tigers eat leopards too, fearsome predators in their own right. Among the most muscular and ferocious of predatory cats, leopards are themselves capable of downing animals five times their size, and hoisting their huge carcasses high up into the trees. However, that doesn’t seem to discourage Bengal tigers from crushing their spotted throats and dining on their innards.
But of all the wide variety of flora and fauna the tiger habitually kills, all the Latin dictionary’s worth of taxonomy it is willing to regularly gulp down its gullet, there is one species that is notably and thankfully absent: Homo sapiens. Perhaps it’s our peculiar bipedalism, our evolutionary penchant for carrying sharp objects, or even our beguiling lack of hair and