The living large carnivores of Siberia include bears, wolves, leopards, and tigers. With the exception of wolves, the others are largely solitary hunters. The tiger has the worst reputation as a killer of humans. However, one Primorsky biologist who has studied tiger behavior for more than 20 years, Victor Georgivich Yudin, said in an interview with Natalia Boyarkina (2000:20):
I can assure you [that] if tigers hunted people, they [people] would never go into the taiga. Yet, there are thousands of people calmly collecting mushrooms, berries, and nuts.
He added:
The tiger cannot make eye contact with humans very long. He possibly will not notice your trembling knees and wet pants if you look at him in the same manner as a wife looks at her husband who came home drunk without any salary in his pockets.
Nevertheless, they are dangerous. Yudin emphasized that the person who encounters a tiger in the tiaga, and tries to run away, will be chased down instinctively.
Among the largest of living Siberian carnivores, the Amur tigers of Primorsky Territory are seemingly a relic population of a species that once was distributed over much of Asia. They are brilliantly illustrated in an article by M. Hornocker (1997). Today, this large solitary forest-dwelling animal feeds on boar, red and roe deer, occasional dogs, and other similarly sized species. Weighing 250-300 kg (550-660 lb), tigers need 4-5 kg (9-11 lb) of fTesh meat daily. In prehistoric times they may have also fed on humans, as they even now are known to enter and prowl around small isolated native villages. However, guns have given humans an overwhelming advantage, and modern cases of man-eating are very rare. Quammen (2003:383) notes that there were no recent cases until February 1976,
When a tractor driver was killed by a tiger along a road near the village of Lazo [northeast of the port city of Nakhodka]. The tractor driver hadn’t committed any notable provocation, and the tiger lingered to feed on the corpse.
Quammen cites other subsequent killings, including one in which a tiger killed and then carried a man up a tree, where he was completely eaten. During Quammen’s winter trip to the Russian Far East to learn about the Siberian tiger, he was loaned a translation of a 1925 work on Russian and Manchurian tigers, prepared by Nikolai Baikov (1925), a self-trained naturalist and ethnographer. Baikov’s writings were an important source for Quammen, who quoted him frequently. One quote is especially graphic (Quammen 2003:389):
When a tiger openly attacks a person, it executes one or several jumps, beating the human along the side of the head or shoulders with blows of its paws.... The tiger digs its claws as deeply as possible into the head orbody trying to rip off the clothing. It can open up the spine or the chest with a single whack.
The causes of such killings vary. We are unconcerned about placing blame; instead we want to emphasize that human life in the late Pleistocene was surely as threatened by large carnivores as it is in their habitat today, probably more so, since some of the large Siberian carnivores no longer exist.
Even small carnivores in many parts of the world can pose a danger to humans. For example, in late June 2010, two separate coyote attacks on little girls occurred in a New York City suburb. There was no sign that the animals were rabid; nevertheless, the girls were treated for rabies as a precaution (Anonymous 2010c). In late October 2009, a young woman was hiking alone on a national park trail in eastern Canada, where she was attacked by two coyotes. She died the next day of injuries inflicted by the two animals (Anonymous 2009).
World History
