Vaillant, J. (2011). The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. Vintage Canada.
Take a journey into one of the planet’s most remote areas; Primorye in northeastern Russia, squeezed between The Peoples’ Republic of China and the Sea of Japan. Converging in this area are 4 distinct bioregions marked by Siberian taiga, Mongolian steppes, Korean and Manchurian subtropics and northern boreal forests – a Boreal Jungle in the author’s terms. It’s not easy being a human here, eking out a living collecting pine nuts, trapping animals and logging – but it’s becoming impossible for the Siberian Tiger to thrive in this, one of the last regions on earth in which they roam.
Russia is not usually thought of as keen on conservation, yet it is the first nation ever to undertake a comprehensive survey of this keystone species and, in 1947, to call for a moratorium on hunting. Russian biologists may have been hampered by rigid Stalinist interpretations of Marxism and its reductionist view of nature, but they and the tigers were driven to their knees by Perestroika, the consequent destruction of Russian state political systems and the opening of the border to China and international poaching. Enter the world’s greatest capitalists and a game changing 1993 New York Times report by Suzanne Possehl: Russia and America Team up to Save Endangered Tiger.
Team Tiger is well funded and supported by the US and Russia, proud and confident in their ability to protect both Amur tigers and humans, certainly confident to resolve the 1997 incident of a man eating tiger in Primorye. But what a strange tiger tale it is; in a part of the world where indigenous peoples revere the animal and where most believe tigers will only hurt if they have been hurt – the Russian team is confronted with the death of a hunter named Markov whose remains would fit into the chest pocket of a sports shirt, tiger tracks that indicate an animal of such size it could drag a grown man without breaking stride and a crime scene in which everything the victim owned – from hunting dog to drinking ladle, to the door of Markov’s cabin – has been mangled, mauled and utterly destroyed. “Why” wonders one of the investigators at the scene “is the tiger so angry with
him?”
A thoroughly well documented and engaging read that roams about in politics, anthropology, history and biology and will give you more information than is strictly necessary to answer the question of tiger vengeance.