Do you know about the man-eating tigers?
First off, not a movie; it’s nonfiction. Bengals have been smashing people for centuries in India. But due to recent conservation efforts and the marauding spread of humanity, tigers and humans are living in closer proximity than ever, and it seems to be making things worse.
Theres a ton to read about man-eating tigers, but this recent story caught my attention, and my imagination. It’s so outlandish—so Hollywood-formulaic—it could be the script of a movie without a single tweak. And it’s all true.
Honestly it’s got everything. In the first paragraph we learn this tiger STALKED THE HILLS and REPEATEDLY ELUDED CAPTURE for TWO DAMN YEARS.
NEW DELHI — A man-eating tiger that stalked the hills of central India for more than two years and repeatedly eluded capture was shot and killed by hunters after one of the most intensive tiger hunts in recent memory, officials said.
This tiger killed 13 people. That’s more people than most people can kill before being caught.
The locals joined forces to save their village, determined to put an end to the beast’s killing spree.
For months, the noose had been tightening around her. Hundreds of forest rangers fanned out across the jungles of central Maharashtra State, combing the bush for tiger tracks, scat, stray hairs, long scratches on trees — anything that might reveal where she was hiding.
It wasn’t that easy, of course (it never is), and so the operation expanded. The search for the tiger now included hundreds of people and a HEAT-SEEKING DRONE.
The hunt grew into a sprawling, military-style operation, eventually encompassing a heat-seeking drone, hundreds of people, more than a hundred remote cameras and a team of specially trained Indian elephants with sharpshooters mounted on their backs.
Elephants. With sharpshooters. Mounted on their backs.
Of course, this was no normal tiger. No, this tiger was as deft as they come, possessing the cunning intelligence of a super-being.
…this tiger was seen as unusually crafty.
Tiger experts say she had benefited from past attempts to capture her and knew how to slink through the bush undetected, sometimes just a few steps ahead of the teams of rangers and police officers looking for her.
They even had to call in the old retired tiger hunter and plead for his help. The guy who everyone knew was “the best to ever do it” but had “left that life behind him” and tried to settle down to a peaceful life in the hills. This is the exact plot of like three thousand action movies.
“She has learned from all these botched capture operations,’’ said Nawab Shafath Ali Khan, a famous tiger hunter whom the authorities had called in to help. “We’ve made her very smart. Brilliant, actually.”
Not even the might of the militaristic operation and its heat-seeking drones could successfully defeat the tiger, which at this point we can all agree is the embodiment of Satan himself. All is certainly lost!
But wait. Through pure chance, our heroes stumble on a possible solution, straight out of left field. Could this tiger have an achilles heel?
The break may have come from a surprise source: a bottle of Obsession cologne.
Obsession (a popular men’s fragrance in the 1990s) contains civetone, a compound originally derived from the scent glands of a civet. In areas where it’s been sprayed, cats take huge sniffs and roll around in it for several minutes.
Last month, the Indian rangers squirted some Obsession on bushes here and there, hoping to draw the tiger out. On Friday afternoon, the rangers sprayed some Obsession and tiger urine in an area where she was believed to be hiding.
This is where you’d turn the movie off for being too unrealistic.
Finally, the showdown has come. They try to take her humanely but since this is a movie and we’re dealing with a MONSTER, of course it couldn’t be that easy.
The plan had been to tranquilize her. But according to the hunters who tried to capture her, she roared and charged after being hit by a tranquilizer dart at short range.
According to the authorities, after she was darted, the tiger moved back, roared loudly and charged the open jeep. Asghar Khan then fired a bullet from a high-powered rifle. The authorities said it was in “self-defense.’’
The beast is dead! Of course, our hardened tiger hunter ends the scene with a show of conflicted remorse, because only through a deep empathy for the beast can he understand it so well.
“I am sad we couldn’t save the man-eater,” it read. Efforts to “save her faded due to the hostile terrain and her aggressive behavior.”
Finally, we have the final celebration scene, where the locals take to the streets to dance and celebrate the mighty reign of terror coming to an end.
Villagers in the area erupted in joy when they heard about her death, shooting off firecrackers, passing out sweets and pumping their fists in the air.
“Now our lives will be back to normal,” Hidayat Khan said. “We can go to our fields and do our work.”
Sometimes the best stories are right there in the newspaper.