Let's talk tigers: key pieces of research and some roaring good reads!

Summertime, sweet summertime: my nightstand is full of books I might actually complete before the next millennium, my constant companions are cats, and I finally have time to focus on my research, so it's time for a post about tigers!

This is one of the books that changed my life.

I began to read natural history books because I wanted to gain some insight into my husband’s work. He studies very small animals and I started large, but I’ve also spent some time with his tiny creatures, when I read Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity.










Tiger led me to read more about man-eating predators and about the various roles the tiger played in the nineteenth century. This led me into the worlds of taxidermy, natural history museums, exhibitions, and colonial hunting. I haven’t surfaced since! Tiger completely changed the direction of my graduate study and the course of what I wanted to research thereafter.

Thanks to Vaillant’s story, I’ve built an entire library about big cats, leading me to meet such fascinating characters as Rowland Ward - Britain’s premier taxidermist, Joseph Paxton - designer of the Crystal Palace, Jim Corbett - famous tiger hunter … and I look forward to meeting many more!

Jim Corbett - who would go from hunter to tiger advocate

F.W. Champion who shot tigers with a camera instead of a gun

 

L.G. Kaplanov who completed the first Amur Tiger census

Rowland Ward: Britain's premiere taxidermist

One of Ward's works: Indian vegetation was actually imported to create this!

Of course, I much prefer my tigers safe and sound rather than stuffed, so I rejoiced to see that their numbers have finally started to recover from all the damage inflicted in the nineteenth century.

One of the works I am pairing with The Tiger is Man and Mystery in Asia.

After months of searching for nineteenth or early twentieth century accounts that mentioned the Amur or Siberian tiger in detail, I was elated to discover this text by a Polish scientist and explorer.






It turns out that the Siberian tiger is as elusive on the white page as he is in the white taiga! There are many reasons for this; on one hand, there are about a dozen ways to refer to the Siberian tiger, and early naturalists sometimes use multiple names in the same work. Geography also plays a part. Found primarily in Russia – and also in parts of China and Korea – the Siberian tiger tends to be discussed in Russian, which I can’t read. I’ve been blessed this semester to work with a wonderful friend, colleague and translator, Irina, but many more texts may exist in Russian that I just don’t know how to find.
The dearth of texts about Siberian tigers is especially frustrating in light of the thousands of pages written about his Indian cousin. Hunting narratives exist in the hundreds; in some instances, hunters report bagging four hundred tigers in a single day.

Soapbox: Try to wrap your mind about that excessive carnage. Then, when you’re properly sick at the thought of orange pelts splattered with blood and decomposing in jungle heat – consider the tigers that don’t exist today because they were wiped out before they got a chance to reproduce, or forced into a genetic bottleneck as a result of this type of careless killing; consider the species that are now extinct: the Javan, Bali, and Caspian tigers. I’ve no desire to elevate other animals above human beings (or to offend anyone by using harsh terms), but this, too, is a colonial holocaust and our current environmental problems often have their beginnings (if not their acute acceleration) in the nineteenth century.

These were prepared by Van Ingen and Van Ingen, Mysore. They look like they're screaming, don't they?

These hunting narratives exist alongside a host of other tiger literature. There are works of human-tiger interaction, like Jim Corbett’s famous tiger tales. There are exhibition pamphlets featuring tiger taxidermy. There are taxidermy manuals that tell you how to skin a cat in great detail (and while there might be more than one way, there certainly was one preferred way in the 1900s).
Then there are Siberian tigers… and very, very little to read!

Interestingly, I don’t think that it’s just the vastness of the taiga or the tiger’s elusiveness that keeps Siberia’s great predator out of print. It turns out that man-eating is a very, very rare trespass for a Siberian tiger – and the danger of man-eaters fed the urge for colonial hunting (along with such minor concerns as: proving that British masculinity was of a superior brand to colonial masculinity, taking trophies, and conquering the land – by literally slaying things).

Ossendowski’s account upholds this truth; he fears the tigers he comes across, but very little is said about man-eating (though he does confirm Vaillant’s account by noting that tigers can and will hunt the men who hunt them. I’m chalking that up to self-defense…).  He also mentions famous tiger-hunter Yuri Yankovsky. Irina painstakingly translated his accounts for me, which was a truly wonderful gift!

The bulk of his work is a travelogue and ethnography. He captures large, fierce spiders, interacts with bandits and criminals, and gives the reader an interesting glimpse into early twentieth century Russia. I hope that by pairing his account - and others like it - with Vaillant's, I can make some connections about how tigers are portrayed in print.