Jim Corbett: Master of the Jungle

by Tim Werling

Jim Corbett was an Englishman who lived in India from 1875-194?.  He is famous becasue he killed many of the worst man-eating animals in history.

There are leopards and tigers in India and many people who live in small villages and survived by hunting and some small farming operations.  Very often some leopard or tiger may become unable to hunt its normal prey, or just finds that people are easy to catch and they become man-eaters.

Jim Corbett killed lots of man-eaters including several famous for killing several hundreds of people before being shot by Jim.

If you look for "man-eater" in Wikipedia you'll find listings of the most famous man-eating animals.  Most of the leopards and tigers were killed by Jim Corbett.

Champawat Tiger: killed 430 people WR

Leopard of Rudraprayag: killed 125 people



This book is a storyized narrative of Jim Corbett's life.  Born in India, hunted various things, and then was repeatedly called upon to kill man-eaters.  Most of the book is interesting enough as a story-like version of his life and first several hunts, although it ends with a mere summary of several famous man-eaters as if this author ran out of time, or pages, in order to keep the story going.

The book is on a very interesting subject, but I preferred reading a few of the books by the man himself to this biography.  Jungle Lore, for example.

Conversion Rates

(h/t: Free Northerner)  Krauser did some estimating to determine how many lays he got from day game in 2013.

Opens: 1,000

Numbers: 250

Dates: 60

iDates: 15

Lays: 27 new girls, 3 repeats from prior years

2.7% "success" rate

I don't have similar day game estimates for me, but I can estimate my success rate for deer hunting in 2013.  My result of a 19" 10 point buck is about as good as only one hunter I know did this year, and better than everyone else I have heard from or of secondhand (vs. in magazines, etc).

Working on property: 3 days/ month March through September: 21
hunting: 3 days/ week from 3rd Sat in September through first week of December: 27
hunting: one day/ week December + first week of January: 4

Work days: 21
Hunting days: 31
Total days: 52

Near misses: 2 (one moving too fast too far away, one at about the minimum size the day after the success)

Dead bucks: 1

In 2013 I shot one buck with 52 days spent attempting to do so.  1.9% And it was one buck in about 31 days of hunting. 3.2%

1.9% "success" rate

Deer hunting and "hunting" girls isn't directly comparable, but it may be interesting to see how many days of "failures" we both had versus our "successes".

If the "success rate" was what we were after, then I'm sure Krauser and I would switch to hobbies that resulted in more successes.  Of course their are other ways to measure success, and other reasons for continuing.

The Elephant Whisperer

by Lawrence Anthony

Last year I listed my top ten favorite books of fiction.  A few changes may have happened since, but the top two books on my list are accounts of a pair of some of the most successful elephant hunters.

Commenter Vicomte wrote:

I take issue with your first two recommendations.

HUNTING ELEPHANTS?

Seriously, that's just messed up. If you like reading about that kind of crap, then you must be an awful person. Your obviously not aware of that elephants are kind, gentle creatures, and are very intelligent. Elephants have been known to cry and burry(sic) their dead loved ones. They even burry(sic) people that they find and think are dead. Sometimes they make a mistake and burry(sic) a person that is lost and has fellen(sic) asleep, but that's not there fault we're all human after all.

So if you want to go and read this garbage then I hope you enjoy being by yourself because thats(sic) where you'll be up in your IVORY tower because no one wnats(sic) to be with a jerk that murders animals because their sick and twisted.

If you want to read a good book about elephants by a decent and caring human being that truly appreciates the majesty of these beautiful creatures, I reccommend(sic) The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony.

Firstly, I'd like to point out that some people are just no fun at all.

Secondly, am I being rude, or grammatically correct, in noting his, or her, spelling errors?

But the purpose of this post is to be about the book recommended in his, or her, comment.

To give you an idea of how far behind in my reading list I am, let me point out that I had not planned on reading this book, perhaps just reading a few Amazon reviews of it.  And so when the book was recommended I added it to my Amazon.com "wish list."  Then, last Christmas, my mother was insistent on asking me what I wanted for the holiday.  "Nothing," was not the correct answer, apparently.  So I directed her to my wish list and forgot about the book I was going to read reviews about eventually.  (Fascinating story, huh?)

So here we are with my new book, and I started reading it.

The book is about a guy who bought a game farm in South Africa.  He and his French wife ran (run?) it to show off the animals to tourists.

The author starts by talking about poachers killing animals in his preserve, their selling of the meat, and his attempts to stop them.  And so on, and so forth...

One day he receives a phone call asking him if he wants a small herd of elephants (seven, as it turns out).  He says, "yes," and spends a few chapters talking about his preparations for fencing them in and their transportation, etc.

I've only read a few chapters past this point but I have enough to tell you that Vicomte's idea of elephants being wonderful isn't as rosy a picture as he, and the author of the book would like us to believe.

The author and his wife (did I mention that she is French?  The author is very proud of this fact.) seem to enjoy living amongst the animals of Africa, and he paints a mostly rosy picture of their park and the animals.

But if you merely read the book, you'll notice that not everything is as nice as he leads us to believe.  He tells one story about his dog being harassed by some monkeys.  And one day his dog kills one.  After he pulls the dog away the monkeys silently collect their dead troop member and carried him away.   "I have no idea what they did with the body," he ends the story with.  He leads to that line by pointing out how wonderful nature and the animals are.

Note an excerpt from Vicomte's comment:

Elephants have been known to cry and burry(sic) their dead loved ones.

If you read this story you'd be led to believe the monkeys took their family member always, had a funeral, and buried him with respect...

That's what our author and Vicomte seem to think.  I like their thoughts on the subject.  They make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Would you like to know what the monkeys almost certainly did, in reality?  They took their dead family member away, away from the dangerous dog, and...ate him.  You can't just go around leaving good meat to waste.

And that's much the story throughout as much of the book as I've read so far.  If you stretch you mind enough... and believe hard enough... you to can enjoy the wonderfulness of the world like Vicomte does.

I like the optimism and joy of that thinking, but to think that way you need to ignore reality.

The reason the relocated elephants need to be fenced in is because when they are not, they kill people and destroy homes and food.  "Conservation's Chernobyl," is how the book's author described what would happen if his elephants got out, again.

One more story from the book to more fully illustrate my point: The elephants are kept inside of an electrified fence.  They prefer to not touch it.  During one escape attempt the elephants pushed their least liked kin into the fence and tried to force him through it so that they would not get shocked.  That elephant wasn't pleased with the situation.

I like the pleasantness, too much is mean these days, but that pleasantness isn't reality. 

I'm not sure if I'll finish this book, The Odyssey is calling me.

Incidentally, have you heard about the elephants killing rhinos for fun?

The Temple Tiger

The Temple Tiger by Jim Corbett is a book by, and about, several stories of Jim Corbett killing several man-eating tigers and leopards in India.

His Wikipedia page comments on several of the man-eaters that he killed:

Between 1907 and 1938, Corbett tracked and shot a total of 33 man-eaters, though only about a dozen were actually well documented. It is claimed that these big cats had killed more than 1,200 men, women and children. The first tiger he killed, the Champawat Tiger in Champawat, was responsible for 436 documented deaths. Though most of his kills were tigers, Corbett successfully killed at least two man-eating leopards. The first was the Panar Leopard in 1910, which allegedly killed 400 people. The second was the man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag in 1926, which terrorized the pilgrims on the holy Hindu shrines Kedarnath and Badrinath for more than eight years, claiming responsibility for more than 126 deaths.

Other notable man-eaters he killed were the Talla-Des man-eater, the Mohan man-eater, the Thak man-eater, the Mukteshwar man-eater and the Chowgarh tigress.

The Temple Tiger tells the stories of hunting several man-eaters, including the above mentioned Panar Leopard.  This is actually the second book of his on this subject.  His book Jungle Lore was first and is apparently similar.

The stories are short(ish), fun, and easy to read.

I decided in 2011 to spend more time reading exclusively non-fiction books and stop watching tv.  Those have been two good decisions. 

"They" say, "truth is stranger than fiction." 

I don't know about stranger, but The Temple Tiger is another non-fiction book that just happens to be better than any book of fiction that I try to read.  The Wikipedia page lists several books by Jim Corbett and points out Kenneth Anderson who also wrote about killing man-eaters in India.

So long as there are non-fiction books like this, I'll not run out of interesting reading materiel.  (And I was behind on my reading already.

The Government is Incompetant, +1

As I was perusing Wikipedia, I found this line in the "elephant hunting in Kenya" page:

"Though elephant hunting has been banned for a 30-year period in Kenya, poaching has not reduced."(sic)

Something was made illegal, by the government, and yet it continued.

Can you think of anything else that has been made illegal and yet continued to happen?  Things like: prohibition, underage drinking, marijuana smoking...

My Book

I've been writing my book on the basics of hunting whitetail deer.  It has been amazing how easily the words are coming out.  The only reason that I did not write the whole rough draft in one sitting is because I type too slowly.

I made an attempt at writing a novel  in high school, but found that I did not like writing at all.  With this (hopefully) upcoming book, it is incredible how easy it has been.

I hope to have it done by next September, in time for next years deer hunting season, but I've never before written a book and I expect that something unexpected will happen and I'll be delayed.

(I promise have it proofread, and spell checked, it several times, unlike the content on this blog.)

Let me know if there is anything in particular that you would like to see in it.  I expect to cover a bit more than is necessary, but let me know if you think that something is important and I'll be sure to to not miss that.

I could probably write a similar book about fishing for muskies, and a book on fishing for Midwestern game fish too.  And maybe I will, if this book turns out well.

What's the manliest thing a man can do?

 

Some ideas:

• Nailing a girl
• Siring a son
• Driving a race car
• Playing in the NFL
• Shooting guns
• Hunting
• Building a house
• Bull riding
• Boxing
• Exploring

I'm sure we could think of a few more possibilities.  But I want to make the case that big game hunting is the manliest activity that there is.  By "big game hunting" I mean hunting the African "big five" or maybe hunting lions or tigers.

I'm currently reading A Hunter's Wanderings in Africa: Being a Narrative of Nine Years Spent Amongst the Game of the Far Interior of South Africa by Frederick Courteney Selous and recently read Death in the Long Grass by Peter H. Capstick.

F.C. Selous

To read of Selous' accounts of his time in Africa is to read about him walking around the wilds of Africa and shooting at elephants from 30 to 100 yards away.  He would follow the "spoor" of elephants until he came upon a herd and then he'd shoot the one with the biggest tusks first with a gun with 1" diameter ball from a muzzleloader. It seemed to take more than one shot, usually.  So what he was doing was walking to a herd, shooting one, shooting it again, and again, then running after the rest and shooting some more.  Realize that these are the largest land animals on earth and have often been known to crush people, and elephant hunters are walking up to them and shooting them with single shot guns that first annoy the elephants before they are killed.

Note that when hunters like Selous were hunting big bored muzzleloaders were all that was capable of downing an elephant.  By the time of 'Karamojo' Bell gun technology had advanced to the point where Bell used guns that are now too small to be legally used to hunt big African game.  With his small rifles he utilized a brain shot to drop the elephants in their tracks.

Once his primer didn't ignite the power and his gun bearer loaded over the top of it.  When he shot the double charge the gun literally picked him up, spun him around, and threw him backwards.  He also got a cut on his cheek and he was unable to raise his right arm for the next six months.  Do you suppose that he stopped at this point, or waited a few minutes before picking up his other gun and running after the wounded elephant?

He often lived on whatever meat he shot, corn meal, and muddy water for months at a time.  And slept out amongst the leopards, hyenas, and lions.

Occasionally race becomes a topic of discussion.  We sometimes hear that blacks are known to be more physical or less civilized.  Until very recently some Africans weren't considered men until they killed a lion with a spear.  And, apparently, the way some Africans hunted elephants was to find a sleeping elephant and then use an axe to hit a leg to slow it.  Do you suppose that more than a few people have been killed while hunting elephants with axes?  I won't comment on race relations today, but hunting lions with spears is a whole lot more manly than whatever our white ancestors did.

Death in the Long Grass has several stories about hunting dangerous game.  Apparently most professional hunters in Africa get mauled by leopards, but manage to get away.  The author described one case where a wounded leopard left its blood trail down a path, then retraced its steps to climb a tree over its own blood trail.  The author said that he was lucky that he waited an hour before going after it because this leopard had set a trap using its own blood as the bait, but died before the hunters followed its trail.

Going willingly out into the African bush, or Indian in the case of tigers, after dangerous game has got to be the manliest thing to do.

Jim Corbett with a famous man-eater