Sunderban Man Eaters

My parents took the first flight to manila yesterday morning at 7:00. Around 5:30 I was already up having coffee watching the national geographic channel on cable tv. The feature for that hour was these man-eating tigers of India.

Most tigers in India do not hunger for man flesh often, only on certain occasions when they are overcome by the urge or as in most cases the cats are in a sick or disturbed state that they eat so. Researchers believe that the tigers must have learned not to mess with homo sapiens the hard way a century ago when India was still a british colony. Tiger hunting season was opened and it brought in Briton game hunters to India in a tiger-killing spree. Today inland tigers must have disregarded man flesh as some sort of a dangerous delicacy eaten at the risk of their own survival.

But in the sunderban delta of the eastern Indian coastline, the tigers in this particular place are still on top of the food chain and still has man flesh listed on is regular diet.

A lot of researches tried to explain this predatory behavior of the sunderban tigers against the homo sapiens. In short they came up with a few explanations.

• The sunderban area was spared from last century’s tiger massacre. No man ever bossed around these big cats and now with preservation laws at their side, the whole human population is now at the tiger’s disposition.

• Bears hanging around in upstream rivers are used to eating salmon. Crocodiles living in African rivers are used to eating drowned wildebeests. Tigers in the sunderban rivers are believed to have been used to dining in drowned human corpses. India is hit by cyclones so often that these rivers are always flowing with drowned corpses, and most Indian rivers find their way back into sea at the sunderbans. But of course tigers love a fresh catch rather than something that has been drowned for days.

• Tigers flash urine on key places to mark their territory (fascinating on how distinctive each of their urine smells). Since the sunderbans mangrooves are always overflowing. The smell is always washed away and the only way to defend their territory is through aggression.

• Salt water. The sunderban mangroves are close to sea that tigers wading in the mangroves drink too much salt water. Thus the hunger for man flesh (remember not to put too much salt in your soup).

Anyway, in a desperate attempt to counter the aggression of the tigers, the people of the sunderban wear masks with imposing human faces, but interestingly wear them backwards. Observations show that the big cats are backstabbers and are more likely to strike preemptively. By wearing masks backwards, such a distraction will confuse the tigers.

Oh how soon did the tigers outsmart such a ploy.

But the reverse mask tradition lives on.

“When they started wearing masks backwards, it scared the stripes out of everybody thinking it was an mental epidemic like the mad cow or something. Til I caught one yesterday and it still tasted pretty much the same.”