When we talk about animals who kill people, we're rarely talking about what we are actually afraid of.

We might talk about hippos who kill us out of defensive anxiety, or mosquitoes who kill us indirectly through diseases, or sharks who kill us accidentally.

They mistake us for another animal.

And none of these really get at what we are actually scared of in our worst nightmares,

in our fables, in our horror movies.

We're scared of becoming prey.

And perhaps historically more than any other animal, the tiger helps us realize that fear.

When tigers kill humans, it's usually murder in the first degree.

They lurk outside our population centers, memorize our movement patterns, stop hunting at night, start waking up during the day,

they begin to sink their schedules with ours so they can murder us and eat our bodies.

Maybe monks walking to and from temple.

Maybe individuals out collecting firewood.

Maybe the travelers who prefer the less frequented path between villages.

You get the idea.

They figure out the predictable ways in which people find themselves alone.

They put themselves in a position to encounter those people.

And when they do, they grab them by the neck,

drag them into the bushes, and they eat their corpse. I don't think we fully realize how many

lives it takes to sustain a large predator until one starts specializing in us. One such predator, a tiger known as the

man-eater of Chumboat, killed and ate 436 people in a reign of terror beginning just before the 20th century and lasting until 1907.

The tigers started by hunting indigenous people in western Nepal, and soon after diversified their diet to include parts of northern India.

Entire villages were frozen with fear.

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