Becoming a Tiger: The Education of an Animal Child Read online

  Paul Leyhausen, observing domestic kittens, described the situation that teaches the kitten to administer the killing bite to its prey, something that it will not necessarily learn to do, even though the motor pattern is innate. Typically, the kitten is gripping its prey in its jaws, when something makes it think there’s competition, such as its mother or a fellow kitten coming close, and it bites down. Adult cats who have not already learned this in kittenhood still can, but it takes a more intense stimulus.

  Other species of cats may take their cubs along on the hunt and, as they get older, permit them to try their luck on some prey. Researcher Randall Eaton has described the predatory behavior of a cheetah mother and her four cubs in a Kenyan national park. When they were old enough they went with their mother when she hunted. When she wanted them to stay put, she’d say “ughh” in a low voice, and they’d stay until she chirped.

  One day when they were six and a half months old, she spotted a warthog with two very small wartpiglets, and for the first time she didn’t tell them to stay behind. All five began stalking the warthogs, who were rooting in the ground with their backs to the cheetahs. When the warthogs saw them and ran, the mother dashed ahead of the cubs and chased the mother warthog. Her intent was apparently not to try to catch the adult warthog, a formidable opponent, but to separate her from the piglets. Meanwhile the cubs chased one of the piglets, running inches behind it, but never making any moves to grab it or knock it down. The other piglet raced away unmolested, and the piglet being chased by the cubs dashed down a hole.

  In Eaton’s analysis, stalking and chasing prey are innate behavior patterns, and cheetahs don’t need significant experience to do these things—although they may need experience to figure out just which animals are prey they should stalk and chase. Seizing and killing the prey requires more experience, and are more flexible behaviors.

  Cheetahs sometimes prosper

  A 1980 paper describes the result when three captive-reared cheetah brothers, Jan, Rogers, and Gouws, were experimentally released in South African nature reserves. The brothers were two and a half years old. To see if they could make kills, they were put in a small enclosure with live sheep, which they managed to kill in standard cheetah fashion.

  They were then released in a fenced nature reserve, wearing radio collars. There they traveled on the roads and paths and made ten kills in a month, bagging four impala, one duiker, one waterbuck, two kudu, and two giraffe calves. They were recaptured and a few months later were re-released on farm land adjoining another, larger nature reserve. Here life was even more exciting, and they got in a fight with some wild cheetahs, and Jan was injured. He couldn’t get around for a week, and Rogers and Gouws stayed with him until he could hunt again. In slightly over two months they killed three giraffe calves, one kudu, one waterbuck, two impala, and an undisclosed number of chickens on the farm. After two months, they were recaptured.

  The interesting thing about the prey they chose is that most of them were so large. Giraffe, even giraffe calves, are not standard cheetah prey. The brothers also made attempts on the lives of some large animals they did not succeed in killing. They attacked wildebeest 21 times and zebra 13 times, but never succeeded in getting either. One cheetah was injured first by a wildebeest and then by a zebra. Another brother was hurt attacking a buffalo.

  Their impressive hunting prowess doesn’t seem sustainable. Their foolhardy inclination to go for the big trophies would probably have produced fatal injuries in time. Nor was their casual attitude toward people and vehicles a good thing. Due to their strategy of going into human camps and eating chickens, they would not have survived the second experimental release if they had not been under the protection of South African game officials, who were there to “dissuade the irate owners” from spearing the cheetahs.

  The bleating of the kid excites the tiger

  Teenage great cats look physically readier to hunt than they are. They may be as large as adults but tiger cubs don’t get their permanent teeth until they’re a year old.

  With the exception of the strangely public tigers of Ranthambhore Reserve in the 1980s, tigers are very hard to observe. Unlike lions, who lie around in great sleepy heaps in the sun in many African parks, or cheetahs, who sprint after prey in the open, tigers (and leopards) are stealthy hunters from concealment and live in areas that offer good cover. Human hunters who want to kill tigers, human ecotourists who want to see tigers, and biologists who want to observe the predatory behavior of tigers have all used the ancient technique of tying out livestock as bait and waiting in an elevated place to see if a tiger comes under cover of night.

  On these occasions mother tigers have been seen letting their cubs practice. George Schaller repeatedly staked out buffalo and saw mothers bring their cubs to the bait. Sometimes the mother would simply lie down and let the cubs do their utmost. If the cubs were too intimidated by jabs of the buffalo’s horns, or if they were simply too small or inept to knock the buffalo down, the mother might do that, and leave the rest to the cubs. Sometimes she held the buffalo down while the cubs clambered over it.

  Padmini, a tiger in Ranthambhore, brought her four cubs to where a buffalo had been tied out as bait, and disabled it slightly by belting it fiercely on the hindquarters. Then she sat and looked on for half an hour while the cubs circled the buffalo and the buffalo jabbed at them. Finally Akbar got up his courage to leap on it and knock it down. His brother Hamir promptly sat on the buffalo while Akbar killed it with a throat bite. Padmini joined them in eating the buffalo while the other two cubs hung back.

  Fiona and Mel Sunquist examined the kills of wild tigers in Nepal and found that the tigers had two methods of finishing off the prey they had caught. Small animals were bitten on the nape, a quick death. Larger animals were killed with a bite to the throat, which in essence suffocates the animal. Young tigers usually used the throat bite even on small prey, perhaps because it is easier and safer for them.

  That certain stagger

  Great cats, like house cats, have innate propensities for selecting prey. Completely naive kittens are bewitched by certain promising phenomena: rustling, squeaking, and furtive scuttling all fill them with a joyful mania to investigate. Halting gaits also cast a spell. Tippi Hedren, an actress who runs a sanctuary for great cats, describes how Needra, a lion raised from infancy by humans, whose best friends were humans, who had never witnessed an act of predation, was riveted by the sight of a small child who had come to visit, crouched, and sprang on him. Fortunately, adults were able to pull Needra off the child and he was unharmed—after all, she had never developed techniques for the next step. The sanctuary lions were also gripped with morbid fascination when one of the staff began limping due to injuries suffered in a car accident. They slunk along the fences, eyes glued to him with a new interest. On another occasion, Casey, one of Hedren’s hand-raised lion cubs, now a 130-to 140-pound teenager, escaped from the family’s house in Sherman Oaks, California, and began strolling downtown. To ensure that Casey would follow her home, Hedren began to limp dramatically. Enchanted, Casey turned, flattened down low, and began to creep after the apparently crippled woman. Outside the house, just as he was about to pounce, Hedren turned, flung a leash on him, and tied him to the bumper of a car.

  Starter victims

  Valmik Thapar, observing the cubs of a tiger called Laxmi, saw them practicing their stalking skills on peafowl, partridges, squirrels, and mice. Inexperienced great cats sometimes thrill themselves by catching something they then can’t eat. The tiger cub Bhimsen, not quite a year old, caught and killed a little crocodile, took it into the bushes—and couldn’t bring himself to eat it. Laxmi’s cubs put a whole night into catching a civet, and when they finally succeeded, found it just too awful to eat.

  Take Your Cubs to Work Day

  Lions don’t usually bring living prey to their cubs (although George Schaller did see one lioness bring a gazelle fawn), and lion cubs stay dependent for longer than most great cats. Tw
o-year-old lions will probably not have hunted large prey by themselves, though they may have helped in group efforts. But cubs who are only a few months old follow and observe the adults in the pride. Schaller describes a lioness catching a zebra in a streambed in the Serengeti. The cubs who sat in a row on the bank and watched her kill it can’t all have been her own, because there were 13 of them.

  Older lion cubs joining adults in nighttime hunts in Etosha National Park did not simply copy their mothers’ behavior, although they learned from watching adults. In these hunts, lionesses take different roles, which zoologist P. E. Stander calls “the centers and the wings.” A young lioness whose mother was a center might see that a wing was needed, and stalk accordingly.

  The tiger Laxmi was prowling with her two cubs, Kati Nak and Ladli, when she spotted a chital. She froze in place, paw midway through a step. The obtuse Kati Nak scampered up to nuzzle his mother, saw the chital, and tore off after it, with Ladli on his heels. The chital raced away, uttering alarm barks that ensured that every animal in earshot knew that predators were afoot. Without a sign of irritation, Laxmi lay down in the shade.

  Wild tiger Noorjahan was hunting, accompanied by her three yearling cubs. Seeing a chital in a favorable location, she crouched in undergrowth. Taking her cue, the three cubs crouched too. But one, Bhimsen, couldn’t stand the suspense—he couldn’t see anything. He raised his head to peer at the chital. Noorjahan growled softly, and Bhimsen crouched back down. A moment later he stuck his head up again, Noorjahan growled, he flattened himself. But he just couldn’t resist peeking and soon the chital spotted him, and another stalk was spoiled.

  Sometimes when she really needed to buckle down and produce the groceries, Noorjahan would ditch her cubs so she could hunt without their “help,” growling at them if they followed. While cubs can be a terrible nuisance, with time they can also become part of cooperative hunts.

  Tricks of the trade

  In the Ranthambhore Reserve in Rajasthan Province, India, in the 1980s, a wild tiger startled observers by taking up hunting in water. This park contains shallow lakes thick with vegetation and, in hot weather, sambar and chital deer would wade in and graze there, in addition to grazing in the meadows by the lakes. In the water they had to keep an eye out for crocodiles, but the coolness and the food made it worthwhile.

  In 1983 a male tiger called Genghis adopted the lakes as his territory, and ran off all but a few tigresses. Early in the day and late in the afternoon he would stroll by the lakes without concealment, surprising and delighting the human watchers, and unnerving the deer dreadfully.

  One day observers saw Genghis lurking in thickets by the lake, so settled down to await events. In the late morning he seemed to have murderous intentions toward a small group of deer walking along the shore, but a panicky peahen tipped the deer off. Hours later, as two herds of sambar grazed in the lake, Genghis suddenly rocketed out of the thicket and bounded straight into the water. Deer struggled to escape in all directions, and cameras clicked wildly as Genghis swam, swerved, and leapt on a straggler. The force of his pounce carried both deer and tiger so far underwater that only the tip of Genghis’s tail can be seen in photographs.

  As he surfaced with his prey, the onlookers were beside themselves with astonishment. “Never before had we seen a tiger even attempt to launch an attack in the waters of the lake; nor was it something we had ever come across in old accounts. Was this just a temporary aberration or were we seeing something really new?” wrote Valmik Thapar. “Nowhere in the literature of the past 200 years have we been able to find any other account of a tiger behaving in this way. As a strategist he is unmatched—an innovator. “

  Genghis continued to hunt deer in the water and came up with several variations on the theme. The original technique was to lie unnoticed in waterside vegetation, sometimes for hours, until a group of deer grazing in the water moved close enough for Genghis to burst out and charge into the water after them. But as the summer went on, the water level in the lakes dropped, and the belt of vegetation thick enough to hide a tiger was farther from the water’s edge.

  Genghis, switching from lake to lake, developed the tactic of swimming into the lake, watching the sambar as he did so. As they floundered away in different directions, he’d pick out a deer that got separated from the rest, and head it off. He also discovered that if he simply sauntered to the edge of the water and stared at the sambar, they would panic and head for the sides of the lake. He’d gallop along the shore in clear view, looking sideways at the terrified sambar thrashing in the water, waiting for one to make a stupid move, and he could often cut one off as it fled the water.

  Using these aquatic techniques, Genghis caught one out of five deer he went after, an unusually high success rate. (The Sunquists estimated that tigers they studied in Nepal made a kill in one of 20 hunts.)

  Genghis disappeared in 1984, and the male tiger who took over his territory, Kublai, had no idea about hunting in water. But Noon, one of the tigresses who had shared the area with Genghis, took over some of his techniques. Inexpert and uncertain at first, she became more skillful and adopted the tactic of the sudden charge from cover.

  Given that tigers have a variety of hunting techniques, and are capable of inventing new ones, I suspect that when tigers think—when cats of any kind think—they are musing about how to become a better mousetrap.

  I hope to teach this fearsome beast to kill and then let it go do whatever it wants, why?

  Arjan Singh raised several leopards from cubs, letting them roam in a nearby forest preserve in northern India. His first leopard, Prince, was slow to master predation. He wanted very much to hunt, but it took time. At 15 months old, he killed some prey that he then did not know how to open and eat. He was not above eating rodents.

  Finding a calf tied up in a hut, he seized it in an inexpert but fanatic grip. Called to the scene, Singh felt that Prince would eventually succeed in suffocating the calf, but the calf’s owner objected. Singh grabbed Prince by the scruff of the neck and tried to haul him off, but the obsessed leopard wouldn’t let go. They tried to pinch Prince’s nostrils shut to make him let go, and that didn’t work. Finally an assistant jammed a stick in Prince’s mouth while Singh beat him with a stick of sugarcane and Prince let go and ran out of the hut.

  Despite Singh’s unsportsmanlike behavior, Prince still invited him on hunting expeditions. By 20 months old, Prince knew how to open and eat the prey he had killed and was almost self-sufficient. Soon he was entirely independent and stopped visiting Singh.

  Two leopard sisters Singh raised, Harriet and Juliette, became independent on a similar schedule, although they were better at staying in touch. When Harriet felt the need to move her first litter of cubs from a den under a tree, she carried them back to Singh’s house and put them in a spare bedroom. The second-generation cubs acquired predatory skills much earlier than their mothers had—Mameena, a cub from Harriet’s second litter, was killing for herself at 11 months old.

  Mentors and role models

  The story of Leo, an orphaned lion cub raised by the family of Kobus Krüger, game ranger in South Africa, and his wife Kobie Krüger, and recounted in Kobie’s book, The Wilderness Family, illustrates how serious omissions in the normal learning environment can be for the predatory prowess of a great cat. Leo knew how to crouch, stalk, and pounce, and often practiced these skills on the Krügers. He knew how to eat wild game he was served. But what came between these two things was not clear to him.

  He loved to walk in the game preserve, and he was fascinated by prey animals, but he had no idea what to do with them. Kobie Krüger, who showed a fainthearted unwillingness to demonstrate by leaping on an impala and sinking her teeth into its throat, was of little use to her lion pupil. The being Leo took for his mentor was not a human, but the Krügers’ wise and impressive Australian cattle dog Wolfie. When they went out in the bush, Leo paid close attention. When Wolfie ran along, sniffing the ground, Leo followed, studying Wolfie�
�s face for hints. “He strongly suspected Wolfie to be the guy who knew all the things that it was crucial for a lion to learn.” If Wolfie dug frantically, Leo stood in front of him and watched thoughtfully.

  Sadly, he had chosen a guy in the wrong profession. When they encountered game, Wolfie was usually well mannered enough to leave them alone, but when things got too exciting he couldn’t resist chasing them—and herding them. Leo understood chasing, and he worked on herding.

  When Wolfie stuck his head in a burrow and a warthog and her three piglets burst out, Wolfie took off after the warthog and the screaming piglets. Leo raced after them too. Wolfie ran on one side of the warthog family, herding them. So did Leo, looking happy. When Wolfie had had enough fun, he ran back to the Krügers for praise (they praised him “for being kind to animals and for not hurting them”). They were forced to pat Leo too, even though they were beginning to realize with sickening clarity that Leo wanted to be an Australian cattle dog when he grew up.

  Kobie Krüger tried to give Leo hunting lessons. She took Leo and Wolfie out to hunt impala and succeeded in locating an unsuspecting herd. She crouched low in the long grass and told Wolfie to get down. Wolfie obeyed. Although Leo did not understand when Krüger gave instructions like this, he did what his idol Wolfie did. She ordered Wolfie to stay, and dog and lion both stayed in place while Krüger crept through the grass until she was on the other side of the herd, where the impala would get her scent. She jumped up, spooking the impala into running straight into the dog-lion ambush. She shouted to Wolfie to get the impala. Dog and lion burst out, right into the path of the panicked impala. “I hoped with all my heart that Leo would respond to some inborn instinct and grab an impala.”