Around the time Teddy Roosevelt was trying to replace baseball with big game hunting as our national pastime, another hunter, an Englishman named Jim Corbett, was becoming a big cat's worst nightmare, kicking ass and taking names all over the Indian subcontinent.
The Champawat Tigress killed at least 436 people in Nepal and India in the late 19th century and early 1900s. The Nepalese army chased her across the border into India, after she killed over 200 people. She was so brazen, she would attack people in the middle of the day, even on the roads and near villages. Finally she was shot and killed by Jim Corbett in 1907. She had already killed one sixteen-year-old girl that day. And Jim discovered that the tigress had been shot in the face once, and still killed people.
In the same area of India, at around the same time, a poacher wounded the leopard of Panar, rendering it incapable of hunting. So, like any good villain, he took his rage/need to eat out on the population that had wronged him. He killed and ate about 400 people before our friend Jim killed him in 1910.
The British government again called on Corbett in 1925. The leopard of Rudraprayag had killed over 125 people, sometimes even breaking through the walls of houses, killing people in their own homes. This leopard terrorized the area for eight years. There is still a fair held in Corbett's honor every year.
In February 1929, villagers called on Jim to help them find the Tigers of Chowgarh, an old mother tigress and her adolescent cub. The pair killed at least 64 people in the area. The first victim was a woman cutting grass in 1922. She came across the mother, who was wounded. Mama Tiger fractured her skull and discovered that people taste pretty good. Jim took four buffalo to use as bait. He found the pair eating a cow, and he managed to kill the cub. But the older cat escaped, and Jim knew it was time to use his buffalo bait.
For ten days, nothing happened. Then a woman was killed on the other side of the village. Jim tied a goat to a tree, but the tiger would have none of it. Three more villagers were killed soon after that, all by the same animal. Finally, in April 1930, many people and eight buffalo later, Jim finally killed the tigress. They faced off, and he shot her from only eight feet away. He performed a necropsy and discovered that her teeth were broken and worn, making killing it impossible to kill wild game.
He hunted these man-eaters with two rifles: a double-barreled 450/400, and an 1893 Mauser. I know very little about guns, but I do know that these are big ones.
But never fear, my animal-loving friends! There's more to the story than that. Just like the guy who wrote Jaws is now an advocate for not blowing up sharks, Jim Corbett did the same for big cats.
Jim was born in India in 1875 and died in Kenya in 1955. He was a colonel in the British army, and was frequently called on to kill man-eating animals. The people in the area loved Jim Corbett, and many people regarded him as a saint.
Between 1907 and 1938, he killed 19 tigers and 14 leopards, all of which were known man-eaters. Combined, they killed over 1200 people. He discovered that the animals he killed were not evil, they only hunted men because they were old, ill, wounded, or starving.
Oh, by the way, whenever he hunted a man-eater, he traveled alone and on foot, in the mountains and jungles of India. His only companion was a little dog named Robin.
Jim bought a camera in the late 1920s, and began taking photographs of the elusive animals. He still hunted, but only if an animal had attacked humans. He often expressed his regret for the killing of one tiger that was not a man-eater, known as the Bachelor of Powalgarh. He lectured groups of schoolchildren on the importance of conservation, founded wildlife groups, and established the first national park in India.
In 1947, he retired to Kenya. He met Princess Elizabeth while they were both staying at the Tree Tops Hotel, a tree house in the branches of an enormous ficus. She was there the night her father died, and Corbett wrote in the hotel's guestbook, "For the first time in the history of the world, a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess, and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience, she climbed down from the tree the next day a Queen— God bless her."
He continued to teach about conservation, and published six wildly successful books. A movie about his adventures in 1948. Corbett's opinion? "The best actor was the tiger."
Jim Corbett died of a heart attack in April 1955, just days after completing his final book. He was 79. Big cats lost a powerful ally and great friend. But his legacy was not forgotten, and in 1968, the big game hunter turned environmental activist was honored when a species of tiger was named for him.
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