Tigers are best admired at a distance. It’s far easier to appreciate these biggest of big cats when there’s no danger of being eaten by one. And the fact is that, while most tigers stick to a diet of deer, pigs and buffalo, they do sometimes kill and eat people.
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Between 2020 and 2024, tigers killed 378 people in India alone. In the Sundarbans mangrove forest of Bangladesh, they are responsible for an average of 22 human fatalities each year.
And there were 88 tiger-inflicted deaths in and around Nepal’s Chitwan National Park between 1979 and 2006.
History is littered with tales of infamous and prolific man-eaters. One female, known as the Champawat tiger, is thought to have killed more than 400 people either side of the Nepal-India border before she was tracked down and killed in 1907.
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The idea that tigers get a taste for human flesh after trying it once is not supported by the evidence, though. In the Sundarbans, 81 per cent of fatal attacks are perpetrated by individuals that killed more than once. However, 50 per cent of tigers that kill people do so only once. In which case, repeat attacks are far from inevitable.
Tigers seem to become serial man-eaters for other reasons. It may well be that humans are the only option available to tigers that are too infirm to hunt more fleet-footed prey - elderly or disabled animals, for example, or those with dental problems.
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More than half of 36 man-eaters around Chitwan National Park bore injuries or deformities that might be expected to hamper their hunting ability. After her death, the Champawat tiger herself was found to have two broken canine teeth.
Physical disability is not the only factor. Declines in natural prey availability has also been implicated as a driver of attacks on people. Captive-born animals might also pose a greater-than-average risk to people. There has been much debate about whether a tigress named Tara, who was born at Twycross Zoo in England and released into the wild by conservationists, was responsible for a spate of attacks in India’s Dudhwa National Park in the late 1970s
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