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HomePageTurnerBook ExcerptsWhy some leopards become 'crooked' man-eaters—the conspiracies

Why some leopards become ‘crooked’ man-eaters—the conspiracies

In Crooked Cats, Nayanika Mathur says the intentionality behind the appearance of dangerous animals is often assumed, with the state accused of conspiracy to murder.

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A variant of the released-from-the-zoo explanation for man-eaters also has some traction in Uttarakhand. In this version, the alien leopards have not merely been released from zoos or rescue centers and neglectfully sent up to the mountains. Rather, these man-eaters have been sent up with an actively malign intent, to kill and destroy the paharis. The conspiratorial element in this explanation is explicit. As I mention above, it needs to be understood in the context of a long-standing historical sense that the plains people have exploited the Himalaya. A very similar discourse is present in the neighboring Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, where several people told me, straight out, that the man-eaters are objects of extermination controlled by the state. Similarly, many residents around the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai believe that in the evenings the park authorities “open the gates” and the leopards come out of the park to hunt and eat whatever they can find—from pet dogs to humans. In studies of human-animal conflict around the world, such an intentionality behind the appearance of dangerous animals is often assumed, with, most often, the state being accused of conspiracy to murder.

There is a much longer history to consider around who the targets of man-eaters are. A popular belief during the period of European imperial domination in Asia was that man-eating tigers kill only Asians and not Europeans. This belief appeared as early as 1662 and continued on till the twentieth century.14 In colonial India, while there were many white Europeans who were killed by man-eating big cats, the number of natives killed is much higher for obvious reasons, including the much larger native population and their increased exposure to tigers, leopards, and lions in daily life.

But it is not just between the white man and the natives that big cats have discriminated. Man-eaters, across time and space, are believed to actively seek out certain categories of person to prey on even while they leave others untouched. The ones who are most likely to be targeted tend to belong to minority or vulnerable communities—refugees, lower castes, mountain persons, adivasis, the poor, women. As I show in this book and as Jalais (2011) has also demonstrated for the Sundarbans, there are complex political and socioeconomic reasons that make certain humans more likely to be victimized by crooked cats. These reasons run along axes of class, caste, gender, race, age, location, and nationality. Thus, crooked cats and their depredations allow for a bloodied mirroring of the wider inequalities of the world.

It is not just the type of person but also the posture or position of the human at the time of the attack that is considered important. In the Sundarbans it is believed that tigers only attack humans when they cannot see the human’s face. Because of this, people were advised to wear masks on the backs of their heads when they went out of their homes, as a protective measure (Jalais 2011; Ghosh 2016). Another belief is that tigers will only attack stooping figures or those who are not in an upright manner. I have been told in different parts of India that if I accidentally encounter a tiger or leopard, then I must make sure to stand straight so that I loom large over the big cat and, hopefully, intimidate it. But I have also been told, perhaps most memorably by my Nani (maternal grandmother), that if I ever bump into a sher (tiger/lion), then I should lie flat on my back and play dead, as, apparently, my Nana (maternal grandfather) once did in Rajasthan when a tiger walked into his room. As is the norm with most quandaries related to big cats, there are contradicting answers to a long-standing question: What should you do if you encounter a tiger in India?

In Mumbai, many of the attacks by leopards took place when a person was squatting in a field or in their toilet. Many a wildlife conservationist has told me that it was only these humans who were attacked, which my own interviews with victims entirely contradict. But the conservationists claim that when the big cats attack squatting human figures, they are doing so out of confusion, for they think the human is a dog or a goat and hence regular game. The large number of female victims in the Himalaya is also often ascribed to women’s “weakness” as a gender as well as their relatively lower body weight that lets leopards carry them with ease. In addition, women are believed to have “sweeter blood” that big cats like. While body weight might have a role to play and not the gendered constructs of weakness and sweetness, the most likely explanation is that women and children are much more likely to be targeted due to the social roles they have and the positions they occupy: fetching water from springs and wood and grass from the jungle, tending to the homesteads, feeding livestock, having to go squat behind rocks and shrubs farther away from humans due to the widespread absence of sanitation facilities, and so on.


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Retributive Justice

But big cats do not just target women or refugees or brown people. They can also narrow their victims down on the basis of other criteria. Between 2012 and 2014 there was a crooked cat in Pithoragarh District in Uttarakhand that appeared to kill only inebriated men. The cat killed six men in 2012 and five men in 2013, all of whom had consumed large amounts of alcohol. The man-eater turned out to be a leopardess and was hunted down in the end after two years. She had been rather selective in her killing for she wasn’t active all the time but would periodically appear in villages in the Didihat block and specifically target drunk men. The belief was that this leopardess’s kin—her “husband” or a parent or a child—had been killed by a drunk man and, hence, this was her seeking revenge. Many other such stories proliferate, especially some that include elements of the Hindu belief in reincarnation. In these accounts, a specific tiger or leopard suffered some distress at the hands of a human, or one of their family members did, and thus, when the big cat is reborn in a new life, it deliberately seeks revenge on that human or on those who are related to the human in some manner. Govindrajan (2015) discusses stories that view man-eaters as sent by the deities that the humans have angered. These leopards and tigers actively choose to spread reigns of terror because the gods have not been properly propitiated or humans have done something—like taking away land on which a temple once stood—that has offended them.

In addition to specific stories of retribution or reincarnation, there is also a widespread consensus that the more you hunt or hurt a species—be it big cats or snakes or monkeys or, indeed, humans—the more you will suffer from vengeful acts, either in this life or the next.15 Notions of retribution and reincarnation cannot be disentangled from Hindu cosmology given that the Himalaya is heavily populated with Hindus. However, as Rashkow (2015) has argued through a study of Hindu opposition to the hunting of animals in colonial India, this protection of wildlife extends beyond religious beliefs to encompass forms of what can be termed “cultural conservation.” He finds numerous examples of active resistance to the killing of animals in colonial India and reads them as instantiations of an
environmental consciousness. In the Himalaya, I am often told that the large amount of killing and poaching of leopards and tigers has made them—as a species and as individuals with particular biographies—angry with humans. Thus, the many crooked cats that exist are nothing but the kin of the hunted, mutilated, and poached big cats, who are seeking revenge on humans. This revenge is extracted by making prey of humans in the very same way that humans predated their ancestors or relatives. Interestingly, studies of North American cougars have indicated that the hunting of them leads to an increase in conflict between humans and big cats. Journalist Noah Sudarsky describes it as a sort of “biological backlash.”

The ethnobiologist Joao Pedro Galhano Alves (1999b) notes that the Van Gujjar community in the Sariska Tiger Reserve in India did not report trouble with tigers and explains it thus: “If the tigers almost never attack people in the region it is because we don’t kill the tiger and so the tiger doesn’t kill. We respect the tiger and it respects us” (cited in Greenough 2012,186).

This is a generalized belief in the Himalaya too—the more you kill and hunt tigers and leopards, the more they will retaliate in kind. In India, statistical studies that draw direct links between levels of hunting and levels of conflict have yet to be undertaken, to my knowledge. It is, however, strongly indicative that the highest numbers of man-eaters are in those regions where there is the greatest level of hunting. Most powerfully, this trend was mapped by the BBC Two documentary “Leopards: 21st Century Cats.” In the documentary, we are taken on a ride through high-conflict and low-conflict areas of India. There is some wonderful footage of a leopard eating its kill quite peacefully near humans whom he is well aware of.

There is also coverage of a region of Rajasthan called Jawai where several leopards come out to a temple with a priest and display no aggression toward either this human or each other or, indeed, the other villagers in the vicinity. This peaceful coexistence is contrasted with the atmosphere in high-conflict regions—most markedly Uttarakhand—to question the very different relationship between humans and big cats there. The documentary locates the answer in the unprecedented levels of hunting that are allowed in Uttarakhand in stark contrast to the rest of the country. In doing so, it displays a discernible overlap between what putatively “scientific” studies throw up and what long-term human residents of regions with big-cat populations tell us. They all tell us that higher levels of hunting or violence toward a species lead to problems in its relationship with humans. Extending this argument to the global scale, we are now realizing that the climate crisis itself is an outcome of the forms of harm humans have collectively inflicted on the nonhuman world over the longue durée.


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Feline Histories

In an interview I undertook with a woman who was viciously attacked by a leopard in the Himalaya, the conversation moved beyond Hindu notions of reincarnation to speak about individualized revenge. This woman, whom I call Vimla, claimed a particular leopard had scratched and bitten her grievously not because it was a man-eater and wanted to consume her. Rather, it was seeking to extract revenge, because when this leopard was a
small cub, Vimla had accidentally injured him. She had been tending to her little farm and cutting weeds off with a scythe. This cub was sitting in the long grasses, unbeknownst to her, and caught an edge of the sharp instrument on his hind leg. At that time she was too scared to tend to the cub’s injury as his mother might have been lurking nearby. So she abandoned the injured cub and ran home. A few years later she noticed that this leopard, which limped a little as if its hind leg was not fully formed, would come and watch her from a distance. If he came too close, then she would run home or mock threaten him with her farming instruments. This leopard never stalked anyone else in the same manner. She knew that it was the same leopard and one day he would wreak his revenge on her. And, indeed, one evening as she went out of her home, she was suddenly attacked and injured. The leopard ran off without killing her—though he easily could have—and has never been seen since or attacked any other human in the vicinity.

Vimla not only recited a tale of the capacity of a big cat to identify human individuals and vice versa, she also pointed out the capacity that non-human animals have to remember and target humans. In a beautiful essay, the wildlife historian Mahesh Rangarajan (2013) tackles the related question of whether lions have history by studying a century of human-lion relations in Gujarat. He is of the opinion that it might be “going too far to endow lions with historical consciousness,” but he does believe they have what he describes as a “memory of memories” (2013, 109). He notes lions have coexisted with humans in relative harmony, other than two periods of breakdowns in this otherwise equable relationship. During 1901–1904 and 1987–1988, there was a large number of attacks on humans by lions, or the spread of what Rangarajan, after Boomgaard, terms “lion plagues.”

Boomgaard had originally spoken of tiger plagues in Southeast Asia as sudden outbursts of man-eating tigers stimulated by a sharp increase in human or animal corpses—due to epidemics, epizootics, famines, and wars—or a lack of game and cattle caused by droughts, famines, forest fires, and so on.

Rangarajan, similarly, attributes increases in conflict to the drought in Gujarat, depletion of game animals, presence of human corpses, and conflict over cattle kills between lions and the humans who were competing for the cattle hide. Corbett, too, has argued that in the 1920s Himalayas there was a surge in man-eating leopards—what we can perhaps call a “leopard plague”—due to the noncremation of dead bodies after a cholera pandemic
(Corbett 1991b). One of the many theories on why the two maneless lions in Tsavo in present-day Kenya became man-eaters also considers the long-term practice of abandoning enslaved persons in the region. It has been suggested that lions learned to eat humans over time due to the slave trade, during which large numbers of humans traveled in the slave trains. When these humans died, their bodies were left by the railway tracks. This allowed for the development of a taste for human blood among these crooked lions
(Caputo 2002).

Lion, tiger, and leopard plague arguments, thus, are centered on the availability of human bodies—either due to natural reasons, such as droughts or epidemics, or due to political reasons, such as the slave trade—and, very interestingly, the learning of big cats to consider humans prey.20 Alternatively, certain researchers ascribe the turn to man-eating to the absence of alternate prey (Packer, Scheel, and Pusey 1990), a situation that can be caused by droughts or floods or, as I discuss in detail below, anthropogenic climate change and species extinction. Almost all studies stress the fact that it takes big cats some time to start considering humans—alive or dead—as something to be consumed. This process of learning to become a man-eater has been studied in various ways: through a focus on adaptive behavior, memory, history, or—as my interlocutors in the Himalaya stress—capacity for retribution. The desire to seek retribution can emerge from any number of reasons.22 It can be directed against humans as a species for their land grabs, depletion of resources, poaching, hunting, and wanton destruction of habitat. Equally, nonhuman animals seek retributive justice from specific individuals for their very particular actions, whatever those may be.

This excerpt from ‘Crooked Cats’ by Nayanika Mathur has been published with permission.

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