Tiger Culture and Biology

Just before dusk the tiger called Collarwali in Pench National Park made a kill. She was walking with her three cubs when she suddenly changed direction. There must have been a signal to the cubs. Instead of following her, as they normally do, they stayed together, milling around for a while before disappearing into bushes. I managed to take a photo (see below) of the three of them together just before they walked into the undergrowth. You can see how the good a camouflage their coat makes. Another two steps into the bushes made them essentially invisible.

A hunting tiger uses this invisibility. Our jeep rolled forward slowly until we were directly behind the tigress. She was positioned in front of a little gap in the bushes. Although we could not see beyond it, she must have seen prey nearby, because she was totally still. I clicked a series of photos, and there is no difference between them at all. Her tail was down, she was perfectly balanced for a quick take off, as you can see in the featured photo.

The tiger is not born knowing how to hunt. Mothers teach their cubs this skill through a series of exercises which begin when they are about a year old. The first exercise is to hold still, as she was doing. Then come lessons in stalking and sprinting. Finally the cubs are taught how to bite through the prey’s neck to kill it. Then, at about age two, when they have learnt all this, they are driven out by the mother to find their own hunting range, and defend it against other tigers.

Later The Family and I argued our way through to some understanding of how such learning could have developed. The tiger is born with the muscles, claws and jaws which enable it to hunt. It is also presumably born with the mental equipment which enables it to stalk prey. What exactly does it have to learn?

Later we came across an article written by Rafael Nunez in which he asks a similar question about the human ability with arithmetic. The number 77 is odd and the product of 7 and 11. Is this knowledge hard-wired genetically into human brains? No, we know that children have to be taught this. Nunez argues that there are biologically evolved preconditions necessary for us to learn such things. He writes “I suggest that numbers and arithmetic are realized through precise combinations of non-mathematical everyday cognitive mechanisms that make human imagination and abstraction possible.” There is, possibly, a similar kind of mechanism at work behind a tiger cub’s ability to learn hunting. We think of human learning as cultural. In an intensely solitary creature like a tiger, do we see the rudiments of culture and learning? We speculated about all this later.

At that time, as the horizon moved up rapidly to obscure the sun, we were silently focused on the still form of the tigress. Then, in the blink of an eye she was gone, crashing through the bushes, and out of our sight. We learnt later from forest rangers that she had made a kill. The next day there were many jeeps clustered around this area hoping to catch a glimpse of Collarwali and her litter as they came back to feed.

The earliest tiger remains were found in southern China, and are about 2 million years old. However genetic studies of different tiger populations indicate that the Indian and Sumatran tiger diverged from the Chinese stock about 12 million years ago. At this time the collision of the Indian plate with Asia had already raised the Himalayas, and the collision of Africa with Eurasia caused a fall in sea levels around the planet. As a result land bridges opened up between many previously separated geographical areas. At the same time there was a global cooling, causing aridity in formerly wet zones. Northern parts of Asia and Europe began to get their ice cover at this time. Extensive grasslands formed a little before this, leading to an explosion of grazing animals, and the evolution of fast hunters. It is likely that ancestral tigers moved into new ranges during these climate changes and then became isolated into the populations we see today. This era could well be ending today.

When we travel I seldom think of the future beyond our own brief lives. The one exception is when we watch tigers. These sleek animals are so elegant, such perfect hunters, that I hope that future generations get to enjoy the thrilling sight of a tiger walking past them.