Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - The Champawat Tiger Part 2 - The Death of One Legend and the Birth of Another

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

As the tiger continues its reign of terror over the village of Champawat, a young hunter hears tell of its carnage and figures maybe he can lend the people and the country he loves a hand. Watch this episode here: https://youtu.be/HEv2jYF6DOM ~ Forkful - Head to https://forkfulmeals.com/tooth for 50% off your first order today! https://quince.com/tooth Hims - To get simple, online access to personalized, affordable care for ED, Hair Loss, and more, visit https://hims.com/toothOllie - Ollie. Feed the Obsession. Go to https://ollie.com/tooth and use code tooth to get 70% off your first box! ~ To advertise on the show, contact us! Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/c/toothandclawpodcast ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Tooth and Claw podcast. We have our wildlife biologist, Wes Larson. He knows a lot about bears, but he also knows a lot about tigers, as you learned in part one. And this is going to be part two. So there's no real need to introduce all three of us. We'll just introduce Wes. Okay. I am going to do a lot of talking this episode. A lot. The ty, what's this one called again? The tiger. The Chompawat tiger. The Chompawat tiger. Yeah, chomp a lot, right? I just watched Coyote versus Acme.

Oh, yeah. Sounds a lot like Tweetybird saying, Shamsawat. Chomsawahwai. I might see that today. We'll see. Well, you should. I liked it.

It's really emotional. That's what I heard. From who? I've been reading some reviews and people saying that it's like a surprisingly emotional movie. So I'll be honest, it's weird in my 40s. I'm in my early 40s. I feel like so many movies make me emotional nowadays. I just find myself getting choked up all the time.

And I don't know why. I think it's ever since we lost Bryce. I'm always just kind of on this cliff of about to cry. When you like rewatch Titanic, you picture Bryce as Jack. Yeah, I picture Bryce's rose and I'll think. Did you guys know that James Cameron went and restaged that to prove that they couldn't both be on the door? And he like did all these different scenarios to show that it's like nearly impossible that the door wouldn't have supported their weight. Well, it wasn't a door first of all.

Whatever it was. Yeah, piece of wood. And then, yeah, they would have been too sunk down in the water and got both froze. Yeah, it wasn't surface area so much as buoyancy that was the problem. And also, the whole freaking point of the movie is that Jack needs to die for Rose. That's the whole freaking idea. Did he like myth bust too when Rose goes to heaven and has like a husband and grandkids and goes straight back to her like one night stand? Yeah, I love that movie.

I love it. I think I have it in my top 20 right now. That's great. I'm so happy for all of you. Yeah. I think it's like even if it's super long, it feels like crisp and fun. I just love that movie. Not like Crispin Glover.

Not Crispin Glover. That was Jesse's like longest celebrity crush, Crispin Glover. Is that over for her now? No, I think she still is into it. Who is that? He was, he is in like Willard. He's, no, come on. He's the dad.

The bad and back to the future. Back to the future. Oh, really? They can't be your go-to. He's the bad guy in one of the Charlie's Angels movies, too. Yeah, he's in one of the Friday the 13th, I think part five or four. Really? Yeah.

So that's what she sees in you. Yeah. It's always a weird thing when you're dating someone that likes to tell you, like, yeah, I just don't really like conventionally attractive guys. Like, I've always just liked guys that are a little bit ugly, and it's like, cool. Thank you. Anyway, well, we are on part two of a pretty big story, and I do need to start with the disclaimer. In part one, I said, oh, don't worry, we're going to get into biology in part two. And then as I wrote out part two, and as I kind of went through it, I realized we left a lot of meat on the table.

And for me to get through the entire story, I'm not. really going to have time to go into a lot of biology. So this is an animal we've covered before, though. Bengal tigers are the same species as Amor Tigers, maybe a different subspecies, but the same species. So we did the Tatiana, the Tiger episode, which is, I think, our first available episode right now. Right now, tease of something coming out soon. But you can get all the biology in that episode if you want to like refresh on your tiger biology go back to that episode re-listing are you sure uh no but because that's an early episode i don't know yeah i i usually went into biology in those early episodes back when our episodes were like eight minutes long i wonder

how much we could fit in there but i i definitely went through it a bit i remember doing a bit but um i remember you got mad at jeff in that episode because he compared a tiger to lebron james and you're like, oh, you can't do that. Wow. I was asking if LeBron James could jump out of the enclosure. That's right. And you can't say that he's in an enclosure. Yeah, that did feel a little weird.

It's that still feels a little weird to me. But yeah, we have, you know, we've evolved. We'll see if we leave that in this time. I think we can probably just leave it, you know, who cares anymore. Yeah, anyway, we're going to do more Tiger episodes. Like, we got a lot of Tiger stuff left in the future. future. This is one of those episodes that as I was preparing for it, I realized like, man, there are a lot of stories out there that we have yet to cover. This being one of them. So are you guys ready for part two of the Chompua Man-Eater? Yep, been chomping at the bit. All right. Oh, there you, there we go. Sorry, the actual expression is champing at the bit. That's the appropriate way to say that. But you can say chomp. It's acceptable. Yeah, we went we went through this before. It's either or at the point. Common usage dictates the laws of the English language, so sorry, I shouldn't have

interrupted at all. I'm an idiot. I think that was totally worth it. I'm glad we nipped that in the butt. Is that acceptable less? I don't think so. I think Bud is still the only acceptable one there. All right, so this tiger had been very active in Nepal. It had killed over 200 people. And if you guys remember, they were really struggling to figure out how to get it away from these villages. And finally, they organized this huge beat, which was essentially a thousand men strung together, making noise, pushing this tiger, and they managed to push it out of Nepal. Was it like a human centipede kind of thing? It's not a human centipede kind of thing. More of a hands across America kind of thing. But hands across Nepal, this tiny part of Nepal.

Okay. So our injured tigers had crossed the river and she'd settled into the area around Chompawat, India, which once again isn't a place you would typically imagine when you think of tiger habitat on the Indian subcontinent. Champawat lies directly west of Nepal, northwestern Nepal, and it's just west of that. And it's in the foothills of the Himalayas again. So once again, we're talking about terrain that's pretty steep, mountainous, the forests are dominated with pine. It's far from the steamy jungles, dry forest, the stuff that we usually picture when we think of tigers. Like, when you guys think back on our experience in Todoba, that was like dry forest with some also kind of wetland and tropical forest.

That's what you think of when you picture tigers in India. You don't really think of like the foothills of the Himalayas, but that's where we're talking about. All right. It's kind of crazy that she killed 200 people in Nepal And it's still going to be the Chompawa tiger, you know? Yeah, well, she killed more in Champawat and that is where That's like if you're from Nepal, you're like, you don't even get mentioned in the name for this I'm glad you mentioned that though because the reason this tiger is called the Champawat man eater is because

Really, we wouldn't have known much about her had we not had the main figure in this story that we're going to talk about come into the picture and kind of write the book on this animal and that's why he called it the chompoat man eater because he really only dealt with it while it was in india um so but that is a good point jeff this tiger for years was you know around nepal and around it's kind of like when dr jay played in the a b a b a b a nba merger we just don't really have like a lot of tape or info on those games. Like we have a vague idea, but you just don't even know we got up to you some of those nights. Yes. Well, that's probably didn't even know he was in there, did you? I didn't. And I didn't know this tiger is in Nepal until part one. Yeah.

Exactly the same situation. They used those like three colored balls. Those were kind of fun. We got to bring those back, I think. Nepal only has three colors in its flag. It's the only triangular flag too. Man, this just the synchronicity is insane. Most countries have three colors. Yeah, but are they triangular? No, Jeff.

So even though this habitat is very different from what we picture tigers in, there were a lot of people, and there were thick forests and steep ravines for this tiger to hide in. If you remember, that's very similar to the terrain that the tiger had been using for hunting

people in Nepal. So when it settled in this area, it almost immediately, began once again killing and eating people. But she had learned a bit from her experience in Nepal. And there were the people joined together to push her from the area. She may have realized just how intimidating humans actually can be. So in India, she started changing her overall strategy. And rather than just staying in one place for months or even years, she would kill and then often move to a different area, spacing her kills out over large distances. And a lot of the people that talk about this say it's like, oh, she learned and she was adapting to her experience.

That could be it. It also could be that in Nepal, she found this one little place that was kind of isolated that had a lot of people. And there weren't a lot of other outlying communities. And in India, there was lots of little villages all scattered around. So it made more sense for her to move around. I don't really know which of them it is. But I do want to say the whole idea of her like being like, oh, well, now I'm going to move around. because I got scared in Nepal.

Doesn't make a ton of sense. You live in Lolo, Montana, so you go out to eat at, like, the same two or three places all the time. I live in Salt Lake City, so I go to a ton of different places. Exactly. Like a steakhouse. It's 3D printed. Horse meat. Yeah.

Never go to the same place twice as Jeff's M.O., especially that place. I wonder if the tiger would ate that steak. Honestly, maybe. Probably not. Yeah. One day in 1903, Jim Corbett was hunting with his friend Eddie Knowles in the forest of Malani in northern India. And as these two friends are walking, they're exchanging stories, they're talking about their experiences in India, and Eddie brings up a tiger. Jim instantly starts to get incredibly locked into this conversation because he loves tigers.

And the main reason he's excited is because Eddie isn't just talking about. about any tiger, but a tiger that has recently killed 200 people in Nepal and has started killing large numbers of people in the Chompawat region of India, which is near where Jim grew up. Jim had heard of man-eaters before, but these stats are like almost impossible to believe, and he really isn't that far from Chompahat. So it kind of feels like this is happening in his own backyard, and Eddie goes on to explain that the best hunters in Nepal had failed to kill this tiger. But he says, don't worry, its days are numbered because his brother-in-law, this guy named B.A. Rebsch, had been dispatched to kill the tiger. And Rebsch was known to be one of the

best hunters in all of India. And both Eddie and Jim figured that within weeks, they were going to hear news that this tiger had finally been killed. A little bit about Jim Corbett. So instead of doing Tiger Biology, we're going to do Jim Corbett biology on this episode. homo sapien. Are they sexually dimorphic? Sexually dimorphic, yes. Eats hamburgers. Eat hamburgers.

Yeah, lots of different food sources. Yeah. All right. He was in his late 20s at the time that he had this conversation with Eddie and he first learned about the Chompuat Tiger. And he had a very special love for all of the wilderness of India. He was one of these rare British colonialists that had actually been born in India, and having never traveled to the UK at this point in his life in his 20s, India had been

his home his entire life. And unlike his friend Eddie that he was talking to, who's really wealthy and well-connected, Jim Corbett really didn't have any standing in the colonial society. His father was Irish, which was already kind of a strike against him, and his father had been a postmaster and had died when Corbett was younger, leaving him alone with his six actual siblings, and then I think an additional eight like step siblings. So he had 14 siblings and his mom that he was left alone with. They moved into a property his parents had been able to purchase during better times. And little Jim Corbett had to give up on a lot of his dreams of like formal education,

moving his way up this colonial ladder because his family is broke. His dad dying really ruined a lot of stuff for him. Pretty selfish if you asked me, you know? Of who? Of his dad. That didn't stop Basil the first from starting the Macedonian dynasty. It's a good point. He was born.

He was of humble origins. That's probably what his mom was always saying to him. He became the emperor. What about Basil the first? And he'd be like, yeah, you're right. I need to stop coming. But on the other hand, Elon Musk wouldn't have gotten where he's at without his dad's diamond mine. He needed emerald money.

Yeah. Yeah, emerald mine. So. Yeah. We all come from different backgrounds. Yeah. I consider them equally impressive. All right.

So what he didn't give up on, though, was exploring the forests and jungles of India and learning about all the wildlife from both British and Indian friends and paid hunters like the Shikaris. He was gifted an old shotgun when he was eight, and when he was at cadet school, he was doing some shooting exercises, and he impressed his instructor so much that they loaned him a really nice rifle. And that's when his hunting really leveled. up. So it really didn't take him along. It didn't take him long to earn a reputation among both

British and Indian residents as someone who could perfectly imitate the grunt of a leopard, the chuff of a tiger. He could track animals through the forest through smell, sight, hearing. He rivaled the best hunters in all of India, and he was famously a really good shot. I was going to say times have really changed because like the way we entertain ourselves has evolved, but it kind of really hasn't. That's like a viral TikTok these days. If someone can just grunt like a jaguar, that would go crazy on social media. Have you seen that kid that does the bird, the autistic kid that does the bird sounds?

Yeah, he did the Atlanta Hawks schedule announcement or whatever. That's amazing. Yeah. I just think it's like shooting guns to like really impress your instructors that much. Because it's like, I feel like a lot of people. hit the target if you're shooting guns very much. So like maybe he did it behind his back. Behind the back shot.

A William Tell situation. Well, one of the most impressive things about Corbett, though, was how he seemed like he was at home in both of the contrasting worlds that were present in India at the time. His family was a colonialist family. So he was well trained in the different manners and customs of colonial Britain at the time. But he also spoke fluent Hindi and Kumban. Maloney, which is like the regional dialect, and he was well loved by the local villagers. So I think he felt actually like a lot more pride for India than he did for Great Britain.

And while he definitely benefited from his privilege as a British resident in India as a colonialist, I do think for the time he was like as well accepted as a white guy could be among locals in India. He had the pass. I don't know if he had a pass. but I know I'm a pass not the past yeah I kind of I feel like I this book made me really the no book or no be so fierce book made me really like look better on Corbett and his own writing and stuff he definitely still had some like colonialist um leanings and thoughts and stuff like I don't want to paint him like he was a saint but he did really really love India and have a deep respect for the people. people of India. That's great. Because even though he was like a big hunter and killed a lot of man-eaters throughout his career, he did have a huge respect for the wildlife of India and he would go on to be one of the biggest proponents for Indian wildlife conservation. There's even a national park named

after him now. And I did want to read a quote from him from the book, No Be So Fierce, that says, A tiger's function in the scheme of things is to help maintain the balance of nature. And if on rare occasions when driven by dire necessity, he kills a human being, or when his natural food has been ruthlessly exterminated by man, it is not fair that for these acts a whole species should be branded as being cruel and bloodthirsty. So even in like the early 1900s, Corbett knew that this isn't in the nature of tigers to kill people. This isn't something they actually do regularly. It's extenuating circumstances that we've caused that often lead tigers to end up killing people. And I love that like this early on, he understood that.

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the more and more I like him. I'm sure one of our listeners is going to send an article that's like Corbett kept kids in his basement or something, and they're going to make me look like I should never have said that he was a good dude, but I do like Jim Corbett. All right. I disavow that. Jeff does not like him.

Well, if he kept kids in his basement. Oh, yeah, I don't like that. I don't think that's a good thing. But he didn't as far as we know. We all have our faults. Our weak points. All right. So when Jim had gone on this hike with Eddie hunting,

he was working on the railroads. He was a railroad employee. And while he got really super excited about thinking about this man-eating tiger living so close to him, both the stress of his job and the assurance, that Eddie's brother-in-law was going to kill this tiger, made him really forget about the man-eater of Chompawatt. Then four years later, when Jim had moved his way up

into the railroad industry, he's working a desk job that's also incredibly stressful, news breaks that this handsome British soldier named Edward Harold Wildblood had killed the Chompat tiger, Walan Shakar, in Kuomon. It's a great name for a tiger hunter. Yeah. So news circulates far and wide because it's exactly the kind of story that the colonial government wanted to broadcast.

This like handsome dashing British soldier named Wild Blood had killed the Chompaw Man-Eater. And he was paid 200 rupees for killing this tiger. It's a lot. I think you can buy the Zora tunic in Zelda with 200 rupees. Oh, does Zelda use rupees? Yeah. You got to have the adult's wallet though in order to afford the good stuff. Huh.

Adults wallet? Yeah, you can only fit 99 rupees in the child wallet and then you upgrade it. Okay. All right. So Corbett at this point hadn't really thought of his tiger in years. He assumed that it had been killed by Eddie's brother, and now he thinks that Wildblood had killed it. So he's surprised in 1907 when he's visiting his home in Kumalan, and he's approached by a friend of his who is the deputy commissioner. And this guy's name is Charles Henry Berthoud.

And Berthoud had a tiger problem. But not just any tiger. It was the tiger. And he needed Corbett's help. So he explains to Jim that Wildblood had shot the wrong tiger. They had to issue a correction. And the Chompawat Man Eater was still out there and was just still killing hell of people at this point.

In fact, in these resulting years, her total tally now was up to five. 434 victims. She had killed more than 200 people now in India, which is an absolutely astounding number of deaths. So he asked Corbett if he could help them kill the tiger, and he pretty much says, Jim, you're our last hope.

It's kind of like Luke Skywalker, even though there's another, you know? And then more after that. Well, it happens if he doesn't get them, too. Yeah. The tiger takes over. The whole world. This tiger would have eaten the whole.

whole world. The death starlet of blowing it up. I think a big part of the desperation here for the colonial government is that they're really trying to sell themselves as like the end-all be-all of government and power. And they're just getting their asses handed to them by this one tiger. So they really want this tiger dead as quickly as possible because it's making them look weak. And they would really love it if one of their guys can do the killing.

So at this point, even though Jim Corbett has no experience tracking and killing man eaters, he accepts this assignment. But he has two stipulations. And again, I think this speaks to how he was a good person. First of all, he doesn't want a reward. And he wants all the existing bounties on the tiger to be withdrawn. And he says that he has too much respect for tigers to be labeled a bounty hunter. Second, he wants all of the other paid Shikari hunters to be called off the hunt.

because he's worried that they'll shoot him on accident while he's out stalking this tiger. I guess that was like a major worry for him was that he was going to get shot by someone else. Did I miss it during the biology of Corbett? Did he look like a tiger? He doesn't look like a tiger. No.

Maybe if he's wearing like a hunter's orange vest, though. Yeah, true. You ever hear a buck fever though, Mike? You know what buck fever is. I actually don't. Buck fever is when like a hunter just gets so excited about shooting an animal that they, everything starts to look like that animal. And that happens a lot.

So is that what Dick Cheney? Is that the Dick Cheney? Oh yeah. Dick Cheney. He has buck fever. Full of buck fever, dude. That dude, yeah. All right.

So the government agrees to both of these stipulations and Jim Corbett says that he will head out to the site of the next kill that happens. He wouldn't have to wait long. One week later, a man shows up in the village in the dead of the night. And this man had been running for hours. He was out of breath. But in between gasps of air, he tells Corbett that a woman had been killed in the village of Polly about 60 miles away. That's P-A-L-I, Polly. And that's where the marathon started, right?

That's the name of my dog. That's how we started marathons. 60 miles is a long run. Oh, shoot. Yeah. 60 miles? That's how far Polly was. This guy may, it may have been like a relay race, you know, where like multiple runners were

dispatched. What's it called? I forget. Lighting of the towers. Corbett immediately gets his stuff together. He gathers up six men that he had recruited for this hunt, and then he leaves Polly on foot, or leaves for Polly on foot. Excuse me.

They arrive in Polly two point five days later. They walk into the town. and they're getting there just as the daylight is fading, and Corbett explains it like a total ghost town. He says all of the residents are in their homes, behind locked doors, there's this thick feeling of fear that was so palpable in the air you could almost feel its weight, and there's clutter and trash and rubbish everywhere, like rotten food,

because no one is leaving their homes to clean up or take care of the village. The food is starting to run out, because the people are afraid to work the fields. And Corbett goes on to say it was like they were inmates. Like they were living in a prison of their own making that this tiger had kind of also created for them. Some more of the prison of the tiger. Yeah.

Tigers are the warden. All right. So I think I didn't do a great job of explaining this, but he really, this made a huge impression on him just how terrified everyone was. You know, it's not like there was just a few, few people that this tiger had kind of influenced at this point, entire towns, entire villages are just absolutely terrified.

Like, people won't even leave their homes because they're so scared of this tiger. And an interesting thing is... Because they don't really have, like, weapons at home either. Not really. Some of them have, like, really old muzzle loading rifles that, and that, but they're not confident enough to use them on a tiger. And these also, these aren't people that have, like, spent a lot of time around. tigers either. Something that's interesting is when we talked about like the leopard of Rudrapaiyag or the

lions of Savo, leopards and lions are often willing to pull people out of their homes to kill them and they'll usually be nocturnal. Tigers don't really do that. Tigers wait until a person goes into like the field or does whatever to go and kill those people. So even though they're not going into homes, people still are like unwilling to leave their residences. So wait, are there. Are there, The people, because you have to invite the tigers in for them to be able to come in, but then Jim Corbett looks like a tiger. So Zach doesn't actually look like a tiger. Yeah.

All right. So what does happen is that Corbett and his men make a fire in the center of the courtyard. And only, you know, after a little bit, do people start to cautiously emerge? and talk to these men. And they tell them that the most recent victim was a woman. She'd been killed five days ago, and then in that time, no one had left their homes. And that they could hear the tiger calling on the road at night, almost like a ghost that was haunting their dreams. So Corbett gets his men settled. And he decides that he's going to go out alone. Again, this is his first man eater that he's hunted. So this is a bad idea, but he just decides he's going to go

do it. He's going to go out alone and sit against a tree that night on the road and hope that this tiger shows up. And he quickly realizes that it's very scary to be out at night alone hunting a tiger that's killed 434 people. He gets so freaked out that he's too scared to walk back to the village and he spends a really cold, really scary night alone on this road. He says like every shadow looked like 12 tigers coming at him. Yeah. So the next day, he wants to go visit the site of these different kills that had happened near this village, but no one's going to take him. They're all way too scared. Instead, he's greeted by a group of about 20 women who were with the last victim when she was killed, and they tell Jim the gruesome

story. So it was about 10 a.m. when they had set out in a group to go collect some oak leaves to feed to the cattle. It's a common practice for women to collect feed for livestock at this time, and while the Tharu people that we talked about that lived in Nepal and lived around tigers, they were used to sharing land with tigers. They're a rarity in this part of India. But the man-eating tiger had been in the area for a while, and so while these women were likely thinking about this tiger, they weren't necessarily prepared for what was about to happen.

And as they were gathering these oak leaves, the Champawat man-eater watched them with its big amber eyes in the dense thicket of a ravine and waited for an opportunity. The women would climb into the oak trees to pick the best leaves from higher branches, and a group of three women had unknowingly picked the tree closest to the tiger that was now slowly creeping closer. It's taking minutes to carefully place each foot to avoid making even the slightest sound, and it was within feet of this tree when one of the women,

who had filled her bushel with enough leaves, started to climb down the tree. and this woman who had done this probably countless times is holding on to one of the lower branches of the tree. She's dangling her feet down like she's about to drop onto the ground and as she's about to let go of this branch, the tiger rises up out of the grass, standing on its hind legs, and grabs her by a foot that's dangling in the air.

So she's like holding onto the branch, extended in the air, the tiger grabs her foot and is trying to pull her out of the tree. It'd be so hard to hold on. Yeah, and we're going to talk about that in a second. I think she's so full of terror. I don't think any of us can even come close to comprehending that kind of terror. So she grips this branch with every ounce of strength she has. She starts screaming and pleading for help for her two companions that are still in this tree. But she's trying to fight the strength of a full-grown Bengal tiger, and it's futile. She's ripped down from the tree onto the ground. And her lifelong friends watching horror as this tiger drags that are still screaming. by the foot into the ravine. Jeez. Dude.

Then the tiger releases. It's like that movie Ashton Cusher, the Guardian, where he has to hold on, toes arm dislocates. Right. Yeah. Kevin Costner. Kevin Costner. He's the one who held on the longest action.

Costner does? Yeah. He's a legend. Yeah. It's all those ranching muscles, you know? All right. So the tiger releases. its grip on her foot, which gives her a split second to rally and get up off the ground to her

hands and knees. But as soon as she does that, the tiger jumps forward, sinking both its broken and perfect canines into the soft flesh of her neck, and likely severing the carotid artery, blood spraying into the air and onto the fur of the tiger, which is now carrying this silent woman by the neck into the dense thicket of this ravine. So our friends are watching as her lifeless body fades from view, and then the sounds of the tiger feeding is drifting out from this undergrowth, and that's enough for them, and they run back to the village. There really doesn't feel like a, what could you've done different there? Yeah, there's not much.

Like, you can't get away from the, like, that's the only one where, like, that old joke of, you don't need to be faster than the tiger, just your friends. The tiger's going to eat one of those women. Yeah. It's just you gotta be lucky, which would? The thing that I've learned too with this tiger is like even when there's a lot of people that go and try and scare it, it just picks up its prey and runs. Like it doesn't leave the prey behind. It grabs it and runs because it's so strong and powerful that it can literally just like run off with their bodies.

I feel like I'd still be up in that tree if I were the other two. My skeleton would just be still up sick. like CT with Johnny bananas on his back. Yeah, the banana's backpack. Yeah. All right, so Corbett listens to this story with both a ton of interest and compassion. And he knows that he has to act fast before the tiger either leaves the area or kills someone else. This village is already starting to have a little bit of confidence in Corbett after hearing that he braved to night alone waiting for this tiger in the dark.

And they ask him if he can watch over the villagers as they collect wheat from the fields. because their food is running out, and they don't want this wheat to spoil. So for a whole day, he just sits under a tree and his six men with the entire village harvest pretty much all of the wheat. He is very, he's a very brave person. I won't take that away from him. But I do like the fact that they took him staying out all night as a sign of his bravery, when reality it was just he was too scared to even go back inside.

He must have like come back and been like, that wasn't scary at all. Yeah. No, I wasn't scared. Yeah, of course I slept out there. All right, but when he again asked the people to take him to the side of the killing, they won't do it. They're still too scared for that. And it really speaks to just how intense this fear is because in Hindu culture, it's actually really important to collect some of the remains so they can have a proper cremation. And they would have been really desperate to collect the remains of this woman.

but the fear of the tiger was too strong. And Jim really wanted to see the kill site because if he can find some tracks or any kind of sign, he might be able to tell what sex this tiger is. And that would actually be really important information for him to use in the hunt. So he meets with his men and they come up with a plan. And Jim decides he's going to put on a little show

that will prove to the people that he's the right man for this job. He's going to do one of those behind the back shots, I bet. Pretty much. Who's the girl who like went around touring gun shows and she'd do all those trick shots? What was her name, Annie? Annie Oakley. Annie Oakley. Yeah.

Probably picked up some tricks from her. He's kind of like the male Annie Oakley. So the next day he asked the village headman where he could go find some of the wild gurel or goral, which are a species of mountainous goat and are really plentiful in this area. And they really just look like a goat that lives in the mountains. And three of the villagers offer to accompany Corbett and his men, and they hike to this high, rocky area where Corbett sees the head of one of these goats sticking up over a rock like 200 yards away. And it's really just the head, and it's totally camouflaged.

So the other men can't see it at all. But they see him raise his rifle and fire. And they think that he's probably just like firing at the mountain or something to try and scare some goats out so that he can get a shot, because there's just no way that he's hitting the head of a goat that far away. And then they're totally shocked when a dead goat tumbles down the slope and lays motionless at the bottom. And then to make it even more incredible

when he does this shot, two other goats that have been hiding scatter, and he like follows and shoots both of them, nailing both of those goats and dropping them as well. Wow. And they're moving... Behind the back? Not behind the back. The apple on top of their head?

Whoa. This is pretty... amazing. It's pretty rad. Even Corbett himself knows that he has pulled off some pretty impossible shots. Like he kind of hipes himself up in the book. And I should mention a lot of this is coming from his book, Man Eaters of Kumawan. So they gather these goats and the men and him head back to the village. Two of the goats are for the people of the village. The other one is for Corbett and his men. And as they're cooking them in the courtyard, Corbett can overhear the townspeople just talking about how he had shot the goats from what they said was a mile away and how it was pretty much a miracle

from the gods that he was able to shoot these goats. So his plan works. He now has a lot of trust from the people. That very same day, he has a lot of eager volunteers to take him to the site of the most recent killing. And when he gets there, he first goes to the tree where he sees something that's really gruesome. On the branch that the woman had been holding onto, there were still strands of skin and small pieces of flesh in the bark because she had been clinging on so hard that her hands had ripped open on this branch. Wow. Corbett then immediately notices the ravine and how it's really the only way the tiger could

have approached the tree unseen. So he walks up the ravine where he finds some tiger tracks. And somehow these tracks let him know that he is indeed dealing with a female tiger, a tigris, who is slightly past her prime. So then he walks up the ravine where he. he finds the site where a big dried pool of blood shows that the woman had been killed, and then a trail of blood across the ravine and onto the opposite bank leads them to the site where the tiger actually ate the woman. There's essentially nothing left aside for some

clothes and small pieces of bone, but he collects the splinters of bone and the clothes for the cremation, and they head back to the village. All right, when he arrives at the village, he has some and then his new companions from the village take him to the site of another tragedy that had happened nearby. This site was a hut that sat on a large grassy hill and inside this hut was a woman that hadn't uttered a single word in 12 months. And that's because 12 months ago the tiger had killed this woman's sister right in front of her. The two sisters had been on the hillside cutting grass with these big long sights. And when the tigress appeared and attacked the older sister,

who was carrying her off by the neck while this younger sister is screaming, doing anything she can to stop it. And in front of all these village onlookers, the younger sister chases the tiger while swinging her scythe and screaming at it to drop her sister and to take her instead. She chases the tiger about 100 yards when it drops the older sister and jumps at her. And when it does this, she realizes she's in overhead, she turns, she runs to the nearby villagers who'd witness the whole thing. And when she arrives, she's so scared and overwhelmed that she can only make these incoherent noises, which they figure is probably just a result of her, like, running really hard.

So they try to go rescue the other sister. And when they come back, they find that the survivor was still unable to talk. And when Corbett talked to her, she had been mute for over about a year. She hadn't said a single word since her sister was killed. So Corbett, here's his story, and he confidently tells her that he's going to come kill the tiger that had killed her sister, and he leaves. Put a pin in that, Jeff. I wonder if she's like, yeah, I'm curious if she, like, talks if the tiger gets killed. Jim walks all over the area collecting stories, but he decides that the tiger has left the area,

and he decides that he's going to walk with his men to Chompawat, which kind of lies right in the middle of this bullseye that this tiger had been creating with its kills. So people walk this road all the time between different places, and when they do it, they often do it together because it's a pretty unsafe road. So while he's walking with his men, more men are kind of joining them, and he's joined by some men that about two months ago had walked that very same road in a group of 20, and they had a story. Basically, as they were walking the road, they start hearing blood-curdling screams, and please for help from the valley below. They stop walking, they huddled together, they're shaking from fright as these screams are getting closer and closer, and then they watch as the tiger crests a

small hill in the road in front of them, and in its mouth is a screaming naked woman. Her hair is trailing on the ground on one side of the tiger and her feet are dragging on the other side. So it's kind of like the tiger's biting her in the middle and her head's dripping down on one side in her feet on the other side. It's carrying her from the small of her back, and she's just bleeding out and screaming for the gods or for anyone else to help her. The tiger passes 50 yards from this group of 20 men, and they just watch as it carries the woman away to her death. So Corbett, of course, is kind of like, wait, so you guys didn't do anything, and they just say they're way too scared, and that the woman was covered in blood. They were sure she was going to die regardless. But when

they get to the village that they were headed, they learned that the tiger had grabbed the girl from that village, and she had been gathering sticks, and that a rescue party of about 30 people, some of them with rifles and drums, are headed to try and rescue this girl. So they joined the rescue party, and I do think they managed to scare off the tiger because when they find this girl, she's lying dead on a rock, but the tiger hadn't started to feed on her, but had licked all the blood off of the body, and it's nowhere to be seen the tiger. Man. Pretty rough.

So rather than judge these guys, though, Corbett says that he's starting just to learn how horrifically scary it is to live in these places where a man-eater is active. And he's got another great quote from his book. And you guys are going to understand why I included this quote. There's one part of it that made me feel like I had to include it. It is a little wonder that the character and outlook on life of people living year to year in a man-eater country should change. and that one coming from the outside should feel that he had stepped right into a world of stark realities, and that the rule of tooth and claw which force man in the reign of the saber-tooth tiger to shelter in dark caverns. I was young and inexperienced in those Champawatt days,

but even so, the conviction I came to after a brief sojourn in that stricken land is that there is no more terrible thing than to live under the shadow of a man-eater, and that's been strengthened by 32 years of subsequent experience. Corbett, shouting out the name of our show. Yeah, thanks for the shout-out. It's the best part of every movie when they say the title of the movie. Face off, off. We've been doing ad reads for Quince for a while,

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Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash tooth. So when Corbett gets to Chompuat, he stays in a bungalow outside the village and one day not long after arriving, he's talking to one of the local leaders on a hill overlooking a long, sloping field of green that leads down to a nearby village. And he and this leader watch as a man leaves the village, and then they watch this man alternatively run and walk in their direction. Like he's sprinting and then walking and then sprinting and then walking. And Corbett tells this guy, this guy's coming to tell us something. And sure enough, the man runs up, out of breath and tells them that a tiger had just killed a girl in their village.

I thought maybe you had diarrhea because sometimes, you know, you're like... Like, have to stop and pinch it. Yeah. To like walk a little bit to keep it in. Yeah. That's how that would look. So they're like, he's either got something to tell us or some diarrhea, which in India. Boy.

You get that. You get that every time. I get it bad. That's how you're moving. You alternatively run and walk everywhere in India when you go. You see me dip behind a lot. lot of rocks. So Corbett tells this guy to hold tight and then he runs up and grabs his rifle out of the

bungalow, some cartridges, then runs back to this man. And he says this guy was really annoying because he could only talk when he wasn't running. So they run back to the village, but the guy's trying to tell him the story and whenever he'd try and talk, he would stop running. And Corbett's finally just like, shut up, let's just go to the village, don't try and talk anymore. and they just run to the village together. That's really funny.

Corbett's really funny. Like, in his books, there's always these little anecdotes that are really funny and really get me. It's such a crazy situation, too, where it's like, I can understand why that guy wants to keep talking. Like, that's a crazy thing that just happened. But then it's like, he just can't get the words out unless he's. I forget exactly how you word it, but he's like, he's one of those exasperating individuals that brains only work when their legs aren't running or something. So he gets to the village, there's a lot of commotion, but a man sees Corbett and he points to a

grove of oak trees about 200 yards away. And he says that a group of a dozen people had been gathering sticks in the area when a tiger materialized out of nowhere grabbed a 16-year-old girl named Premka Devi. and that no one had seen this cat, they only knew that it had grabbed the girl when they heard these choking sounds and they turned around to see her in the jaws of the tiger. Everyone else had ran back to the village

and they sent this messenger to tell Corbett. So, this is victim 436. He goes to the grove of trees. He finds a bright spot of crimson blood, so it's very fresh, and a broken necklace of brightly colored beads. He follows the trail. of the cat with this girl, which he says is easy because on one side of the tiger tracks,

there's these bright splashes of blood, and on the other side of the tracks were drag marks from her feet. So again, it's carrying her that same way. He finds her sorry, the sorry dresses about half mile away from the kill site, and then her skirt on top of the hill. A man that the local leader had sent shows up behind Corbett, and he's a little irritated about this, but he lets the man join him after making him take off his heavy boots to telling him to step lightly. Like this guy had really heavy boots on and Corbett's like, you got to take those off. And then he immediately leads this dude through a bunch of thorns and nettle bushes. The trail of blood leaves them to a creek that goes down a really steep and hard to navigate

ravine and it's full of brush and this guy from the village completely loses his nerve. He begs Corbett to go back. Instead, Corbett finds this big pillar of rock, and he has the man climb on top, and he leaves him there. He says, that's a safe spot. Just hang out. You can wait for me there. And then he continues on. He comes to the junction of another ravine, and at the junction, there's this small pool of water that has patches of blood around it.

He sees splinters of bone all over and lots of blood. And it's obvious to him that this was the spot where the tiger had started to feed before he had skisks. scared it further up the ravine. And then he sees something strange by this pool of water. He kind of gets closer to it. He's looking at it. You can't really make out what it is. As he gets closer and closer, he realizes it's the girl's leg.

It had been bitten off below the knee. The cut was so clean that it looked like he had been chopped off with an axe. And blood is still leaking out of it. Yeah. Pretty gnarly. So as he's staring at this leg, he suddenly has this really intense feeling that he's in immediate danger. He slams his rifle butt to his shoulder.

He puts his finger on the trigger. He raises his head. And at the same time, he's looking down his rifle. And when he does this, he sees a little bit of dirt and rocks go tumbling down the bank in front of him and into the pool of water. And the tiger had been just about to pounce on him, but him swinging his rifle up so quickly had stopped the attack. Wow. Yeah. This bank in front of him is like 15 feet and it's steep, so he can't climb it,

but he runs at it and jumps up and grabs some bushes, pulls himself up on top of it, and he sees where the tiger had just been, like the plants are kind of starting to, like, right themselves, and he finds a big rock where she had been feeding on this girl again. The tiger had grabbed the girl's body and headed back up into some really rocky and rough terrain, and it's really hard to move through these big rocks, and he keeps finding spots where the tiger had stopped,

to feed and then kept moving because he's interrupting it. That's such an interesting, like they're both really smart. He's really smart to like get that like spidey sense almost that he's about to get. I mean, I guess seeing a severed leg should probably make your senses a little more alert, but still. And then like the tiger was about to happen. Yeah. Was about to pounce on him and knew actually I'm going to die if I pounce on him here. Right.

You know. Yeah. Tiggy sense. It also, the thing that really struck me at this point is it's like pretty hard to overstate just how brave Jim Corbett is. Like this tiger's killed 436 people. She was highly defensive. And he is just like chasing it up a ravine with one gun. You know, he's unreal brave.

And she's growling at him while they're in these rocks that he could hear her growling, but he never saw her. So I just like this I don't think I mean I don't think I could do something like that you know like it's pretty crazy That's kind of like Trump versus Biden's debate, you know Just two masters one step ahead of each other Four D chess or whatever they call it yeah a real display of cunning Like each had two checker pieces that's about it neither of them were able to score a single move. It's getting late, so Corbett decides to go bury the leg of the girl so he can collect it later for her cremation.

I don't know why he didn't just take it with him, but for whatever reason, he buries it. And then he goes to get this guy on the rock, and they head back to the village. On the way, this guy almost slips and blows Corbett's head off with his gun. And Corbett in his book says, at that moment, I decided I would only hunt alone from now on. Like, he's never hunting with another guy. He really doesn't want to lose this tiger, though. So he decides what to do. He knows that the people in Nepal had managed to scare her by organizing that beat.

So he decides he's going to do the same thing and force her into very narrow gorge that's covered in trees. How do they know that? Last standoff. They know quite a bit about this tiger at this point, about her history. Yeah. So he asked the local leader, the guy that he'd been sitting on the hill with, to round up men. and to meet him at 10 a.m. the next morning. And this guy managed to find 298 men that were willing to help with this beat,

some of them with ancient rifles. So Corbett positions the men on this ridge where he wants them, and he tells them on his signal to make as much noise as possible, but not to leave the ridge unless he personally tells them to leave the ridge. And then he makes his way down to the gorge, but when he's about 150 yards away from this gorge, the men start firing their rifles and making noise before he gives them the signals. So he has to sprint down to this gorge and he has to settle kind of into the first place that he can find that's maybe an okay place to wait for this tiger.

So it's already not going very well. The noise from this man is just going absolutely crazy. He catches a brief look at the tiger and then here's a gunshot and Caesar go up a different direction. He manages to fire a single shot after her. which is just kind of a hail Mary. He misses, like he knows he misses this shot. The men up on the ridge are firing more. They're yelling.

Suddenly the tiger crashes into the gorge and the stream that Corbett is also standing in. He has a split second to remind himself that his rifle shoots a little bit high at this altitude. He adjusts up a tiny fraction and he fires. The tiger stops, and although Corbett thinks he's hitter with his first shot, he also doesn't know because she doesn't react at all.

These glowing amber eyes are now on fire. They're absolutely fixed on Jim and she turns toward him. Gives him a great shot at her shoulder, which he takes. This time he knows he hits the cat, but she keeps coming. Her teeth are bared. She's growling. She's just absolutely in full defensive mode now. And he's in a bit of a pickle because he'd only brought three shots and now he's fired

all three of them. Which kind of speaks to his inexperience with man-eaters because he's like three shots is definitely not enough. I should have brought a lot more. But at that time he figured like how would I ever need three shots to kill a tiger? I'm only going to need one. So three is like excessive. Yeah, he was like too good of a shot.

He got too cocky. And he'd killed tigers before, but they had been, you know, tigers that weren't man-eaters. Luckily though. You think he only had three shots with those goats and kill? killed all three? Probably. Yeah. Old three shot Jim is what they used to call him. Luckily though, the Tigris doesn't charge him, but she walks up a narrow ledge of rock to a big overhanging rock, and there's a bush up there, and she's really angry, and she starts just kind of tearing into this bush. Corbett runs to the leader of the village who had followed him,

and he asks him for his gun, which is this really ancient muzzleloader that shoots like a round bullet. He grabs it, he runs back to the tiger, he carefully aims and fires, but this gun is so old that the bullet doesn't hit the tiger in the head like he intended, it hits it in the paw. But this last shot is somehow enough to kind of finally cause the tiger to collapse, and she lays down on this big flat rock. And this tigerist that had been looming large over two countries and thousands of people for the better part of a decade, takes her last breath, and she dies on a rock in this forest. So a bunch of the men who had been part of this beat show up, and when they see the dead tiger, they immediately begin shouting that they want to hacker to bits with their machetes,

and essentially, like, tear her apart with their own hands. And their ringleader is a man who's holding a sword, and he's screaming that the tiger had killed his wife and his two sons. But this tiger is on this rock that's really hard to get to, and they're, and they're not able to climb up there, and the anger starts to kind of die down. They start to kind of get a handle on their emotions, and they apologize, but Corbett's really sympathetic, and he knows that he can't possibly understand, like, the rage and the sadness that these people are feeling. He's then able to carefully lower the body of this tiger's down, and he immediately notices the broken canines. And, like, on the spot, he says that that was the cause of this tiger's down.

switching to specialize in humans rather than natural prey. Wow. He's about to skinner then and there, and the men beg him not to, and they say they want to carry her body through the villages so that the women and children could see her and know that their long nightmare was over. Like they felt like the women needed also to like have this kind of closure. And there's a lot of celebration that follows the death of this Tigris. Corbett presides over a big feast.

They kind of have this tour where they go through all the different villages with their body and then her skin. And he takes the skin, he starts for home. But, Jeff, pull that pin out. Yeah. He stops at the hut of that woman who had lost her sister and lost her voice. And when he spreads the skin of this tiger out in front of her, she starts calling for her husband. And her voice miraculously comes back to her.

Oh, wow. This was the first man eater that Corbett would ever kill. And it establishes them as something of a legend. and as someone the local governments would call when there was a big cat or maybe a bear or a wolf or something that was killing people. And we know from his other stories that he probably became the most successful and accomplished hunter of man-eaters that the world has ever known. The Chompawat tiger had killed 436 people by the time her life came to an end. Leopards, too, they called him for. Yep, and leopards, sorry, yeah.

I said big cat. I said big cat, didn't I? Yeah. Oh, maybe. 436, you said? Yeah. Yeah, and one bush. So one volcano killed 2,000 people, Pompeii.

Sure. So that's kind of nothing still. That's nothing. Is that all that volcano got? Yeah, that's not enough for a volcano, in my opinion. Yeah. I think it, I've heard that it's a lot more, like, as like, I don't know. It's 2006.

16,000. Yeah, and we should mention that with this tiger, too, there's a bit of debate. There's people that think she probably killed a lot more because record keeping was so poor in a lot of these villages that it's likely that she killed a lot more. There's people that think she killed less. How did they get that number? That's just what was reported. Like, those were the ones that actually were reported to the colonial government. So, like, okay.

So it could have been some different tiger. in the mix or like if you yeah yeah there could be a lot of things but um we're just going to stick with 436 for the purpose maybe like some old person was about to die and the tiger killed him like a like a old person had covid and was about to die and the tiger killed him yeah like a stab hat all right so she is thought to be the most prolific solitary man eater that we've ever known. The Nunjombie man-eating lions and the crocodiles of Ramri Island both have killed more people, but there weren't single animals. And those are stories that we'll still tell. But before we move on to our categories, I just really quickly want to visualize just how many people 436 really is.

The roster of the NBA, the current total roster of the NBA, is around 450 people. So she killed almost the entire roster of the NBA. The voting members of the U.S. House of Representatives is 435. So when you see those videos, though, of all of them sitting in that big hall, she killed every single one of those people. It's more than the number of people that fit in most IMAX theaters. So, again, just a way to visualize how many people this tiger actually killed. All right, well that wraps up our story of the Chompawat Man-Eater.

So you said it's for like one single animal, this is probably the one that killed the most people on record. What was that crocodile we did a story on that had like Gustav? Yeah. But it ended up being like a lot of other crocodiles too. Potentially. And it was only around like 300 plus. So not quite at the same totals. But a lot more reason to doubt those numbers than even the Chompawat, I think.

The leopard of Ruripayag was in the like between 100 and 200. And then there's another leopard we're going to do at some point called the Panar leopard. And I think it's thought Tiff killed around 400 people. But when you look at these lists of like the most successful man-eating animals, the Chompat tiger is always at the top for like single animals. And it's like by, it's like John Stockton with a sis. It's like second place is like half as many. Yeah.

The Pinar leopard, it killed a lot. But we'll see about that one. Yeah. What about that one brown bear from Sankabetsu? Also known as the Sankabetsu brown bear. Yeah, we still need to do that one. I want to say it's around like 12 people. Bears don't kill nearly, yeah, nearly the number of it.

Compared to that volcano. Are you serious right now? That's more like Mount St. Helens. subject. Yeah. Why don't people tell us to do the volcano story? That's what I'm wondering now. All right. You guys have any questions about the Chompat tiger before we move on to our categories? So it seems like attacking individuals that were part of a group of people wasn't beyond this tiger. Is that normal for a tiger to not really be concerned? Because I know with brown bears, we always cautioned people to go out with groups of two or three people in that. drastically reduces chances of attacks.

I think the thing to remember is none of this is normal for a tiger. Like, this is not normal tiger behavior at all. But as far as man-eating tigers, her pulling a person out of a group isn't, like, that's not unheard of. Like, that's not something that's totally, but they're ambush hunters. You know, like, with bears, we're typically talking about like surprise encounters where the bear is suddenly having to analyze the situation, it's suddenly having to kind of try and figure out what it can do. And when there's a bunch of people there, it's just like not, it's too much information for it to process and too risky. This tiger is seeing these people from a distance. It's creeping up slowly.

It's carefully plotting, you know, where it's going to make its move, where it has the best cover, which person is going to be the easiest for it to grab. So it has time to kind of assess and analyze. and that's why it would take a person out of a group like that. I feel like leopards and tigers, especially to have easier surroundings to get away with a kill, you know, and are more capable. Like they can carry it easier. They have more coverage so they can kind of like hide with something pretty quick. Yeah, they also have spent their entire lives learning how to hunt, whereas bears are much more just kind of grazing and opportunistic and can hunt, but that's not like their ammo. Yeah, cats don't eat vegetables.

Nope. Do you think if a bear encountered, so in the first human centipede movie, it's three people attacked, would that scare a bear off or would it be just like, that's just one thing? So I'm cool now. I'd go after it. I didn't scare them off. Right, because it is three people. Have you seen that movie? I have, no.

Yeah, neither have I. I refuse to watch that one. That'll be my pick for you to watch during No Pants. I don't think I'll do it. I honestly don't think I would. Yeah. I think that the bear would initially be scared, but like, bears are curious.

So I think it's, like, it depends how long they keep going. I think it'll maybe eventually come check it out I'd be like this kind of fracked up I need to go see this It's like Wes waiting to watch it Like he's curious though One day I am curious It'll get the better of them

Reading the Wikipedia on that one's going to be enough for me I don't need to watch that movie Yeah Before categories The Volcande Fuego Killed 194 confirmed deaths in Guatemala So that's more like the leopard Yeah, this tiger is more powerful than a volcano.

So I learned that there's never really been a volcano that killed just, I guess, 2000's a lot. Yeah. Yeah, it's like one 9-11. Yeah. It's not even. All right. How many people died in 9-11? Like 3,000.

Counting the pilots. Yeah. The hijackers. They wanted to die, though. Yeah, they were like, well, okay. Let's just let this die out How heavy do you think that guy's boots were? I don't know.

Yeah. And then he's like, blames him for slipping. It's like, well, let him wear his fucking boots. Yeah, that's true.

That's crazy. I don't know about this gym guy all of a sudden. It's so funny too, because he had on like lightweight boots, and then he tells this guy to take off his boots, and then he just immediately talks about how thorny and nettley the ground was. But he doesn't bring up the guy at all.

He's not like, yeah, I feel bad for making this guy take off his boots. It's so funny. It's messed up. Yeah. The moment you notice something's off in the bedroom, it tends to stick with you. But most guys might sit on it longer than they should. And Hymns makes it simple to actually do something about it with real treatment options 100% online. Hymns connects you with licensed healthcare providers online, giving you simple access to legitimate

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First one, a favorite pop culture hunt. So it can be anything. It can be a hunt for national treasure. It could be a hunt for animals. Red October. It could be the hunt for Red October. Any kind of hunt in pop culture. I went no country for old men.

Just like starts with him hunting antelope. And then he finds like the drug deal gone wrong and like the rest of movies. Him and the Antoine guy like hunting each other. Yeah. That's a great pick. Hmm. Thanks. You're welcome.

There's a 2020 movie called Hunter Hunter, which is all about this like hunter and his family that live off grid and they're being terrorized by like a wolf. But then a man, an injured man, shows up on their doorstep and he is not what he seems. And I'm just like a bit of a content warning for you. It has one of the gnarliest endings I've ever seen in a horror movie. but it is a really it's a movie that really stuck with me and that I quite enjoyed so that's going to be my pick

also just a quick disclaimer now that we're in categories I'm not going to go out and fix this but you may hear one of my chickens in the background who was just absolutely trying to derail this episode so yeah just enjoy the beautiful noise of a chicken that needs to lay an egg

Hunter Hunter that's what it's called uh huh holy cow that's Have you ever heard of that, Mike? Well, I was thinking he was going to talk about the anime Hunter Hunter by Tagashi, but no. I'm pretty sure it's called Hunter Hunter. I'm crazy if it's not. Yeah, it's Hunter Hunter.

Okay. Is there an X in between the two Hunter words? No. No. Okay, then it's not the anime. But they're both kind of like. You're safe. Claude.

I'm going to go with the Witcher 3, the Wild Hunt. It's a game I actually, I've not finished it yet. And it's on hold again now that they're. announced a remaster for it and some new DLC like 10 years later which is really unusual but um it's a pretty special game with Gerald running around doing his thing

just hunting. Hunting. He's actually, the wild hunt doesn't refer to Gerald actually which is a it's kind of a little mystery there. All right. Exactly. Well, you should know what the wild hunt is if you played the previous games but you probably haven't statistically.

I haven't. I played like one video game in the last four years pretty much and it's astrobot. What about mini golf? Besides mini golf. We do play a lot of mini golf. Why besides minigoth? That transcends video games for me.

Walkabout is more of a relaxing. Mike. Yeah. Did you ever like big game hunter at arcades? Oh, I love that game. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Just kill like 400,000 Black Panthers in one round.

Like, what is going on here? And then it's just like a hot, like scantily clad woman with a gun. A baby dancing in front of you. A camouflage bikini. It always would be like this big bull elk walks out and you're about to shoot it. And a dough like flashes the fastest ever in front of it. Secret service just takes a bullet. And it's just like, you shot a dough.

I remember that. Like, they had that game of the movie theater I'd go to, and it was back when you had to get there early to get seats. And so I'd go, like, really early and then just play big, big buck. Is it big buck hunter or big game hunter? I can't remember. I think they're just both. Yeah. A few different ones, yeah.

All right. Next category. A time that you've had to hunt really hard for something. This one's actually, I had about five years ago I went into a Nordstrom rack and saw some shoes. that I really wanted and they're just a ridiculous pair of shoes. It's the Steve Madden loafers with like, they're bedazzled with little, just like, rhinestones or something. And they're just a little rich for my blood back then.

So I didn't buy them and I thought about them for like 48 hours straight. So I went back with every intention. Small or something. They were like maybe a little too. I probably could have squeezed into them. But I went back after two days with just like constantly thinking about them. And they were gone. And I was just like ever since I've been just scouring the internet.

It took me like years just to figure out what they were called. And finally I found a listing on eBay. And these are the ones you're probably thinking of, Jeff. But I bought them. But they're like size four. There's no shot I'm going to fit into them. But it was like such a gratifying moment when I finally figured out what they were called and then actually found a listing for them for sale. So I still have them.

You are, or how close to them, aren't you? Not very close. I should go grab them and show like a picture, but they're so cool. But it was a good hunt. They gave me a run for my money for a long time, but I persisted. When I, like around the pandemic lockdown and everything, I was working for Hawkwatch. And it was a great job because I got to go out and look for golden eagles. And then once we had eagle nests that had active birds, we would often

put trail cameras next to them and then we would tag birds in their nest by repelling into them and we had this nest who had an eagle with the with the chick and then it suddenly was gone and the eagle was gone and we didn't know what had happened and it was kind of a mystery and that was really good data for hawk watch to understand and so we had to hike all the way I hiked with the science director over at hawk watch steve we hiked all the way up this like really hard ridge it was a hard day it was hot, we get up to the top, and it's a nest that's like pretty steep, but not too far from the top with like a 400 foot drop. And Steve was like, hey, do you want to repel into this one? And I was still kind of learning the ropes, so to speak.

And so he, he like showed me how to set up everything. The ropes. He got me all set up to repel down into this eagle nest. to collect the camera. And the one thing he told me was do not drop the camera, you know, which obviously,

like, don't drop it. It's 400 feet down. And there's important data on this camera. And the first thing I do when I get this camera unscrewed is I drop it

because I was scared. I was repelling. And it falls down. It just shatters into a billion pieces on all these rocks. And so the hunt, what is the hunt for this?

Like a plate. Yeah. Yeah. We had to find the SD card that was somewhere in all these rocks. And it took hours and hours and hours of searching. And finally, we did find it. It exploded that much. Oh, yeah. It was like, it was 400 feet.

So it was just like in tiny little pieces everywhere. Yeah. But he was very kind about it. And we did find it. And we learned that this eagle mom just kind of watched his chick, got too close to the edge and then fell off. We had a video, this bird, like, right on the edge. And then all of a sudden, she just toppled off the edge.

And the mom just kind of stuck her head out and looked. It was like, whoops. I just flatted? Yeah, it just died. It wasn't old enough to fly yet. Wow. I wish your chicken would do that. I do, too.

Um, in college, me and Mike's first time. rooming together, we like found this puzzle at a thrift shop with a cat on it, but it's like a thousand piece puzzle and it's from a thrift store so you're not confident that all the pieces are going to be in there. But as like we got close to the finish, it's like, oh, I think this is going to work out. And we get to where there's one piece missing. And we look at it. And we look everywhere and can't find it and it was the most frustrating thing ever and then it turns out our friend's recent or like new girlfriend had who he ends up marrying so worked out but still mad at her taken one of the pieces and put it in her purse so that she could finish the puzzle and it's like

you can do that if it's your puzzle with your boyfriend but you can't do that with like our random puzzle Yeah. How mad versus like, like kind of funny did you think that was, you know? I never thought it was funny. I was relieved because I wanted the puzzle to be complete. Yeah. And then it kind of dawned on me later like, she can't do that. No. I think I was maybe a little less emotionally invested. I didn't, I didn't care too much. I don't remember caring. Maybe I did in the moment. That would bother me. I think I would be like, yeah, this isn't allowed. You got to break up with her.

We've talked a lot about where the big cats rank in our personal rankings, but I think often in those rankings we're considering a lot of different things. Like their abilities, sounds they make, whatever. I want you guys to rank the following big cats solely based on how pretty you think they are. So just their beauty. And I want you... Beautiful. You said. Yes. And I, we're only talking typical coats here. So we're not talking Black Panthers, White Tigers, any kind of genetic variation, just like a typical coat for these cats. All right. Mm. Tiger, Jaguar. Black Panther might be number one. Okay, well, we're

not doing it. Tiger, Jaguar, Lion, Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, or Puma. Cheetah and leopard. Yeah. I went number one leopards. Okay. Then I said tiger, jaguar, lion, cheetah, snow leopard, mountain lion. Oh, wow. All right.

Interesting. But yeah, I think leopards with their long tails, their coats, like, coats. I just think they're the most beautiful. Yeah. I'm going to go tiger, jaguar, snow leopard, leopard. Cheetah lion cougar I think Cougar is really the only one

I feel like you can exchange anyone and put them in first place honestly except for Mountain Lion which I do think is just kind of like See for me leopard Was the only like clearly had its spot At one And the next six

I could have changed the order for Yeah I was going to say My margins in between these cats Are very small like I think they're all incredibly beautiful animals. But I have the same first three as Mike, tiger, jaguar, snow leopard. And then I go mountain lion, which I really thought about putting in number one. Because I just, I don't know what it is about them.

There's something about their faces that I just think make them so beautiful. And then I have cheetah, leopard, and lion, rounding it out. Lions are least beautiful. Lion. Yeah, I think, but I still think they're incredibly beautiful. Like if you tell me to rink the top African sunset. I know, but all of these animals are beautiful.

Yeah. Oh my freaking gosh. Oh my gosh. Why don't you put them at one then, Jeff? Yeah, Jeff, because you're so hot for lions. Well, I have them pretty high. Where are they for you? They're like fourth.

They're right in the middle. Yeah, it's not pretty good. Fourth. All right. Let's move on to the next one. something animated you loved recently. And this is an honor of Elisa and Seichi, who are the two animators that created the really wonderful episode artwork for this episode.

Elissa also did our Treadwell artwork. I gave these guys like a week to put this together, and they perfectly matched the vision I had for it. So thank you so much to both of them. So impressive. And they're professional animators, so that's why I wanted to do this category. something animated that you've loved recently.

Mike, how do you say the one I've been watching on Netflix? The End of Evangelion? Evangelion. Evangeline? Yeah. The end of Evangillion. It's kind of, it kind of feels like Pacific Rim almost, where it's just like sticking kids in these robots to go fight monsters.

Yeah. But like the opening song and closing song, we're just like so amazing and I just really loved especially the first part of it like the first 10 episodes I was just like wow yeah that's the best yeah yeah got she pretty good thing that's the best when you watch 10 episodes of something and you're like wow afterwards wow yeah uh no I'm happy you're watching that there's only like a few few shows too where I'll like try to watch the opening and closing credits. Especially on Netflix because it's like so easy to skip them.

You almost like you have to like try to not skip them. I know I hate that. I hate when you're stoked to watch the ending credits and then it just does the little tiny window and you have to click back on it. Yeah, because all you do is watch Marvel movies and then you don't get to see the last scene that's a teaser for the next. The middle credits. I'm only watch Marvel.

I am watching a Marvel again, I guess, with lanterns. Mike, what's yours? I'm going to go, so ask me tomorrow. You could ask me tomorrow. Why didn't she go ahead and ask me tomorrow? I'm going to ask you today. But why don't tell us what? It's tomorrow.

What is it now? To right now, it is the anime movie Redline. It's really right out there. Spirited Away from my favorite animated film ever, but it's just like this intergalactic, uh, racing series and it's just like so beautifully animated and it's so exciting in the character designs and everything about it's just so freaking cool.

Why does that have to do tomorrow? Isn't that like, because if you ask me tomorrow, it's going to be spirited away. But today it's Redline. Why? Well, this isn't your day. You just ask me on any given day. You can just tell me what can be his favorite. It can be.

You didn't say. The category didn't have. have to be your favorite though it's just something animated you've loved recently but i'm happy with that answer so ask me tomorrow i'm gonna pick pussin boots the last wish have you guys seen yeah yeah of course it it it was such a surprise to me because i don't really i don't really with the shrek universe you know it's not really my thing but that one i saw all the like the love for it and i watched it and it was one of those movies where within the first few minutes, I was just like, this is so much fun to watch. I'm just having such a fun time right now.

And I think movies like that are few and far in between for me these days. And it continued throughout the entire movie. And I've rewatched it since and I really enjoyed it. So I'm going Pussing Boots, The Last Wish. Great. I might have my favorite villain in any animated movie. It's so cool. I texted him, Wagner, because I was his driver. And I was like, hey, I really look. loved you in Pous and boots. He's like, thanks, dude. Probably like one day of work that he forgot about. He's like nominated for the Oscar for some boring-ass movie I never saw.

Secret agent. Oh, come on now, Jeff. Hold on now. Hold on. It's probably great. I shouldn't say boring. It is long. All right, but it is great.

We're going to do a quick. We're Mike and Jeff paying attention. You each are going to get. at four questions and I want to know who wants to go first. I don't even care. Uh, I'll go second. Okay. Mike, in which country was Jim Corbett born? Indiana. India. Correct. Jeff. In what industry was Jim Corbett working when he first left to kill this man eater? So you say what industry? Yeah. railroads

Railroads Correct One to one He should just Built a railroad To the tiger Honestly That would have been easier

Doesn't encroachment Kill tigers All the time Whoever wins today I'm going to send a mystery A mystery gift too All right Mike

How many total people Did the man eater kill Ooh You said this number So many times 436 Correct 436

Jeff Where did the last bullet The Jim Corbett shot at the tiger Hit it The paw The paw, correct Mike What was the productive

This is from episode one What was the productive tiger habitat In Nepal called? The tarai The tarai, good pull All right, Jeff What species of deer Was most likely one of the main food

staples for this tiger prior to her injury. I'll give you a hint. We saw this deer in India. Oh, shoot. Red deer. Mike, do you want to try and steal? Yeah, it's like the gow roll? Gowl?

You're thinking of the sambar deer. This was the spotted deer. Spotted deer. Mike, last question. Jim Corbett was in what decade of his life when he first heard about the Chompawatt tiger? Um, what, in his, uh, second decade? Yeah, it's 20s.

Yeah. That's a 30th. I guess that's not a second decade. That would be the, dang. Okay. All right. Yeah, I don't get that one. I'm not getting that to you.

Jeff, to tie it. How many living subspecies? She just said, no, why would you ask the question that way? What the heck? How else do you ask that? How do I try and get his, like, the answer of his 20s? That's a good point. The 20s is what I should have said.

Jeff, how many living? Sub-Species of Tiger are there if we're accepting that there's multiple subspecies Seven. Ooh. Mike, you want to steal? Nine? Six living species, subspecies. All right.

Mike wins. Mike, I'll be sending you something through the mail. Something great. All right. This one's from Jensen. A couple listener questions real quickly. This one's from Jensen. Hey guys.

New here, haven't been able to listen to all the episodes, so I hope this hasn't been asked and answered before. What's your favorite animal that can only be found in Europe, if you can think of any at all? Cheers from Bremen, Germany, keep up the excellent work. Europe? Yeah. Huh. I'm going to go European Badger. The Badger is what came to my mind, too.

Yeah. There's a chance they trickle into Asia, but I'm still going to go with European Badger. I can't think of anything that doesn't go into Asia. The Iberian lynx would be one that is only in Europe. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. That's a really good one. Oh, yeah, that's pretty good.

All right. Here's another question from Lindsay. What do you think is the most ticklish animal? My knee jerk was to say red panda, but it almost looks like they want you to tickle. Right. They stand up. That's a good answer to us. Yeah.

Because that's kind of what you do when you say, like, don't tickle me, too. You know? Don't tickle me. Yeah. I think like a hedgehog or you go like this, huh? Yeah, you hug yourself. A hedgehog or a porcupine where like their belly is so protected, it's just got to be so ticklish where nothing ever touches it, you know? Maybe that's why those hyenas are always laughing, you think?

They're tickling each other? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I'm going to say orangutan because they're always hugging themselves. Okay. Dude. So they're just like, don't tickle me all the time. Or an armadilly. Hello?

Because they're just rolled up in a ball. They don't want you to tickle them. Don't touch me. This one's from MZ. Hey guys, I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and lately lots of bears have been seen in town. Several have wandered into public parks and been relocated. I've heard of lots more getting into people's yards.

I've lived here all my life and have never seen anything like this. What conditions in the bear's habitat would cause them to come down from the mountains and into town? I want to do this one because lots of people have been sending us questions about black bear activity in their communities. It has been a really bad drought year in the West. And when we have bad drought years like this, a lot of berries and whatnot fail. Like a lot of the local natural food sources for black bears will fail.

And they have to be a little bit more resourceful when it comes to getting food. And that often means traveling larger distances, taking bigger risks. And I think that's why we're seeing a lot of bears in people's communities this year. and they're probably also looking for water. So if you live in one of those places where this year you're seeing a lot of bears,

make sure to secure any food attractants so they can't get them. And just realize that they're having a hard time and do whatever you can to avoid having any conflict with them. Walk your dogs on a leash. Just be careful. They're really adaptable animals. They'll be okay. But we have to make sure we give them the space to be okay.

If you have two friends you're really close with, sew yourselves together and then give us the results. Yeah. And then tell us if the barrel still come get you. We need the data. We need to know. Be useful. They're like dogs too, so don't let them be outside if it's too hot.

Let them... This isn't true. Yeah. Don't leave them in your car with the windows up. This one, Mom Cindy sent to us, but Maddie wants to know, she wants us to cover the end of Oak Street, but we can just give our opinion on it.

Do you watch the new dinosaur movie End of Oak Street? I did. Yes. Me and Mike had very different experiences. I really liked it, and I texted him right after, and he was like I almost walked out, and it was, like, shocking to me, because I was having such a nice time.

I do feel like we've fought, not fought, but we've argued a bit about fend. feathers on dinosaurs. And I like feathers on dinosaurs, but not on like the saropods, like the bronosaurus, brachiosaurus dinosaurs, like those didn't have feathers, most likely. And some of the other ones that they put feathers on, it was kind of like, these ones don't need feathers. We can have some dinosaurs without feathers. I really like the end. There's like a crazy little moment at the end that you have to pay attention to see. And, uh, I liked it. I thought it was mean. You like the very ending? Uh-huh.

See, I thought I hated the end, but I was having a fun time. But then I was like, you pulled your punches when you brought the husband back. Should we spoil? Yeah, quick spoiler here. Did you see that there was two of the girl at the party? Yeah. Yeah, and to me that, like, is really dark because it means that she, like, took the husband away from the other family and left them alone. Yeah.

Like, she pulled the husband away and left the other people. people to die. Right. But I didn't see that. Yeah. I liked, I liked seeing the husband die and he's just dead, you know? Well, yeah, he died in his reality though still. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I like seeing him die because it was maybe the worst acting performance I've seen anyone give in a very long time. It was pretty bad. It was really tough for me. And this is a movie, I'm going to need to rewatch it. I'm going to reserve like final judgments for if I ever see it again. But I, I just, I don't know. I thought it wasn't very fun or imaginative. I thought the screenplay was pretty weak.

And there were a couple of flourishes with the camera that were fun, some like tracking one shots that were interesting. But I don't know. It just didn't really. It did me, I guess. It did scratch and itch, though, like, because so many Jurassic worlds have, like, not killed any main characters.

Yeah. And, like, not really had very cool dinosaur deaths. So for me, it's like, okay we got some dinosaurs killing some people yeah which is fun the dinosaurs were like an unstoppable force kind of where it was like they are just going to keep coming at us and i liked how mean it was i liked that it was a movie that didn't hold back especially for being pg 13 i really appreciated that so i liked it i had a genuinely good time i wish there was less feathers on some of the dinosaurs and i wish they didn't look so like pink and like fleshy

but outside of that I really enjoyed it I really like you and McGregor too I just need him to yeah I don't know what I need him to do sometimes he just doesn't work for me yeah I guess whenever he's doing

an American accent it doesn't work yeah I think that's what it is for me I also there was like some weird like the bully storyline didn't really go anywhere there's a few things that I thought felt flat but I liked it the neighborhood was like

oddly vacant Yeah. At the beginning we had like a whole block party going on. And then by the time the dinosaurs are really out doing their thing, there's like eight people total in the movie. It's just strange. I didn't love that like we just heard all the screams and destruction and stuff but didn't see it. Like I wanted a montage of like carnage. But yeah, that would have been fun. Okay. Let's do a quick conservation corner. And then we're going to leave this one. There's thought to be about 3,500 tigers in India alone. West just burped. I just burped. I had to take a quick second to burp. Nepal or Paul, as we like to call it, has somewhere around 400. Also just like a quick, you know, we're thinking of people in Nepal this week as they've had just like an absolutely horrific natural disaster. It's one that I've been thinking about a lot.

So if we have any listeners out there, we hope it happened again. Yeah, they're just, it's unreal. And it's especially crazy thinking that like Nepal is one of the most climate forward countries out there in the world, but they're paying the cost of what we've, you know, inflicted on the world. Anyway, in Nepal, there's thought to be around 400 tigers, which is also thought to be about the maximum that the current tiger habitat in Nepal can support. What type of habitat is it? The tarai. The, yeah, the like lowland. It's like wetland that butts right up against the foothills of the Himalayas.

Yeah. So it's like close to mountains, but the habitat's not mountains. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. Worldwide, there's probably about 5,600 tigers left in the wild across the different subspecies. India has about 75% of the world's tiger population or even a little more. The low point for tigers was probably around 2010 when it was thought there was only about 3,000 wild tigers left in the wild, which is crazy considering that there's probably.

about a hundred thousand just in India at the turn of the 1900s. Around 1900 there's thought to be about a hundred thousand tigers just in the Indian subcontinants like Indian Nepal. They've lost about 95% of their historic habitat so while habitat is a huge issue for them I do think this is an animal where hunting poaching and wildlife trafficking are as equally destructive as habitat loss if not more so. Every part of tigers from whiskers to their tail has been found in illegal wildlife markets. Their bones, their teeth, their skins, everything has been used for health tonics and folk remedies, traditional medicine, status symbols. They are an animal that has just been highly desired

in that trade and it's awful what it's done to them and their populations. And what it's done to other cats too. Like now, Jaguars are being killed in South America as replacement parts for tigers in the traditional medicine trade. And they just say they're tiger parts. So it's terrible, but tiger conservation is

ticking toward a positive direction. They are, a lot of their populations are growing, but the demand for tiger parts is ongoing in the trade. So once again, we just urge any of our listeners out there to never buy any kind of

product or souvenir or anything that has potentially been made from tiger parts. Don't participate in tiger tourism where the tigers are drugged or chained down or whatever to. Just be really smart when you're in these places that have tigers or in places that have traditional medicines. You don't need it. It's not going to be a miracle cure. And it's leading to the demise of an animal that we all really love. What if a listener wanted to do something like?

really, really extreme to help protect tigers. What could they do? I would say train to be really good with a gun and then go be an anti-poaching person in one of these countries. Like go be on the ground fighting poachers. Yeah. All right. Well, that is it for the story of the Chompawat man eater. I hope you guys enjoyed listening to it as much as I enjoyed researching it. It was a crazy story. It's the birth of our, you know, one of our kind of mythical heroes from that time, Jim Corbett, the birth of his career at least. And then, yeah, I hope you guys liked it. It was fun. Yeah.

It's incredible how many people one animal can kill. Yeah. Like just with how good we've gotten with, like, managing wildlife nowadays, it just feels so impossible. you know. Yeah. Even in like the 90s though there's been man eaters that have really gone on a big tear and I think even more recent than that. So it does still exist but you're right not not in this way. All right. Well with no further ado then we'll end this episode. All right. Love you guys. All right. Love you. See ya. Bye.