Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag: Part 2

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Wes finishes telling the story of the leopard of Rudraprayag, and Jeff gives a small sample of this years Animal March Madness bracket. Watch this episode here: https://youtu.be/47YKr1svj-s ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ 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

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Welcome to the second and final installment in our Leopard of Rudra Priag series. We hope you've had as good a time listening to it as Wes had researching it and Jeff and I had hearing it. We just wanted to make a quick intro to explain a little bit about what happens in the second half of this episode. It's the time of year for our Animal March Madness bracket. So we went through the first round of half of the brackets, and we'll finish that up in a subscriber episode that'll be coming hopefully later this week. We had a lot of fun, and we can't wait to see what you vote on for the listener results. since Jeff's been posting that poll to our Instagram account pretty much every day for the past week or so. So, as always, I've been doing too much talking.

Let's get to the episode. Let's go. Choice Hotels get you more of what you value. Comfort in, it's calling your name. Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Book direct at storeshotels.com. Welcome back to Tooth and Claw. So we got West Larson, Jeff Larson, and Mike Larson, and we are

Tuth and Cloth and Cloth. Been trying for so long. No, Mike Smith, he's great. He's a good guy. We like him. Mike, say hi. Hey, hi. I messed that up.

You gave me really simple instructions and I messed it up. You said say hi and I blew it. No, you're all right. I got a bloody nose just before we started. recording, so I might be like a little nasly. I was trying to move stuff again with my mind. That'll do it. That always happens.

There's a cost to that, Jeff. Stranger Things makes it look so easy. I just get the bloody notes. I can't move anything, though. Yeah. What's her name again? Elephant? 11.

11. Oh, 11. Oh, man. That's a good joke, right, Jeff? I liked it. It caught me off guard. I haven't got a bloody nose in a while. It's probably been at least, probably at least 15 years.

And then I feel like I've gotten hit in the nose pretty hard in those times, but I just haven't gotten a bloody nose. Maybe I don't have any blood. Interesting. Yeah, it is interesting. Vampire, do they have, they don't have blood, right? Or do they? They drink blood?

No, they do. Because remember, like, Dracula will cut his own arm and, like, give it to someone to turn into a vampire. Right. That's his move. This is go-to move For turning people into vampires Erascible old man Yeah

He's a bit of a scoundrel Well who doesn't So you're a zombie maybe Zombies don't blood Zombies probably just have like dried up blood Yeah that's he I'd say that's probably it Well that's cool

I'm gonna kill my cat No don't No we're an animal We're pro animal here Wes I'm recording in his room And he'll like I'm in and like meow at the door. And so I'll be like, okay, he wants to leave.

I'll let him out. And then he just goes outside and meows at the other side of the door. He can't make up his mind. Classic cat. I'm going to murder it. Speaking of cats, we're doing part two of our leopard story. Should we just get into it? Oh, wow.

Finally. Yeah. Yeah, let's go. I don't want to write a second longer. I feel like you guys are joking. West told us not to interrupt him much this time because he's all scathing. I'm just turning my mute button on real quick. Also, I got one, I saw one Apple podcast review that said, like, that Jeff guy interrupts West too often.

So I think I'm done interrupting. You're done interrupting, huh? Yeah. The rest of the podcast. Yeah, I'm done. Just use the hand raise function and we'll call on you when it's, yeah, a good time. We'll have a Jeff corner where Jeff is just able to interrupt. 30 minutes straight.

Sometimes West just gets like dry mouth and is like drinking water and taking a break and I say something. But then Mike cuts it all so it sounds like I'm interrupting him. Yeah, that's my strategy. It's because it's always offensive. Whoa. No, dude. So we're going to get into part two of the leopard of Rooder Prajag. This is a long story.

And with these stories, I generally try and pick a good break point for like the different parts of the story. Had I known this one has as much as it does, I might have even made it a three-part series because I definitely didn't pick a good halfway break point. I should have read a little bit farther in the book. There's a lot to get through today. That's why I sent you guys that text and told you there's a lot to get through. There is. You know what you should do is I like it when people do the so long story short kind of thing

and then they just make it really short. We're doing a lot of that. We are doing a lot of that. Even with that, there's a lot to get through. The book is really interesting. Again, the book is called the Leopard of, the man-eating leopard of Rudra Paiyag. It's by Jim Corbett.

And it's really good, but like a lot of these books that are written by these guys in like the late 1800s or early 1900s that are big game hunters, it reads much more like a report than it does a novel. It's not necessarily very poetic. usually and so it is kind of hard to get through so I am that's why is that a little scatterbrained is he the same guy that wrote Garfield that's Jim Harrison right or Garrison what's his last name

I think it's another gym it is it is Jim okay sorry that's my one interruption yeah no you're good you used it in a really good spot there yeah all right okay so where we left off was we had read I had gone over a number of attacks this leopard had done. We talked about some of the superstitions behind it. We talked a lot about leopard biology. And right as we ended the story, it was right before Jim Corbett showed up on the scene to hunt this leopard. So we're going to go back. We're going to go way back to 1.8 million years ago.

An early teenage hominid, one of our ancient relatives, was hunting for food near the entrance of a large cave in what's now South Africa. What this ape-like hominid didn't know was that it also was being hunted. Life on the ground had brought some pretty new advantages and threats for early man, but one of the primary threats was lying in wait in the grass right behind this unaware teenager. The big cat pounced and landed on the back of the shrieking ape, but in a matter of seconds its lower canines found a soft spot, and the predator bit down, pushing those large sharp teeth through the eye sockets of the struggling paranthropis and cracking a skull while the upper teeth crunched through vertebrae.

Mercifully, this bipedal early man died instantly. The leopard dragged its kill to the nearby cave where it would leave the bones that would be discovered by paleontologists almost two million years later. Wow. It would be a reminder of our relationship with one of our oldest monsters in the dark, and that one would still be hunting people in the 1920s in Rudra Priyag. That same one? It's like a million years old.

The same monster in the dark for humans. So this is, leopards are an animal that we have a very long evolutionary relationship with. Pretty much as soon as we started coming out of trees and walking on two legs, they started hunting us pretty actively. And they are one of our oldest predators. There's a very long relationship. And they still sometimes hunt people up to the current day. But we're going to be talking about leopard. Keep like your old traditions alive.

It is, you know. It's a good relationship, a long-lasting relationship. Has its ups and downs. We've definitely done a lot more to them than they have to us. All right. So we're going to go over a couple more. We've killed hundreds of thousands of them. Okay.

For their coats. We're going to go over a couple more of little vignettes of the terror that this leopard was inflicting on the population. Two brothers who are both ranchers, were moving 30 buffalo between grazing grounds, and they were accompanied by one of the men's daughters, who was 12. Based on their behavior, it's really likely that these two men that were grazing their buffalo near Rudhryag

hadn't heard about the man-eating leopard, or they were just really overconfident that their buffalo were going to give them some protection, because they're being pretty casual about their camping choices. They set up a makeshift camp that's surrounded by forest, they tethered their animals in a nearby field and then they just laid out some blankets on the ground and fell asleep and from like hearing everyone else talk about

how they were living their day-to-day life while this leopard was on the prowl this is akin to like suicide like you're just asking for it laying on the train out and be open like this yeah so in the early hours of the morning it's still completely dark the men are woken by some anxious booming calls of their buffalo and they know that these calls are akin to the noises they make when there's a carnivore nearby. So they go to investigate and they leave the 12-year-old girls sleeping on the blanket. Oh my God. They light a lantern.

They walk through their buffalo. They calm them down. They return to their camp. Something's different in their camp when they get back. The little girl is completely gone and there's a few large splashes of blood on her small blanket. It's too dark to try and follow this trail, the blood trail. But at first light, they go look, they find some blood splashes. They go down a narrow field, down a steep hillside,

and they find her remains scattered around some boulders. The crazy thing about this is this leopard had passed them. As they were, like calming down their buffalo, it was passing them with one of these guys' daughters in its mouth. Oh, all right. Just teaching them a lesson how to be a better parent, you know? I guess. Live and learn. A pretty harsh lesson.

Okay, so 20 pilgrims are traveling the road near Ruriparayag when they arrive in a small village and they get food and water from a local shopkeeper. The shopkeeper urges them to hurry up and walk the remaining four miles to a pilgrim shelter because it's getting dark and the area around his shop had been frequented by this man-eating leopard. But the pilgrims were really tired and they begged him just to be able to sleep on a large platform that extended from his shop. Shopkeeper is going to be a leopard, I bet. They're too tired to recognize it. Or leper.

Ooh, that'd be dangerous, too. A real twist in this story. They're arguing with the shopkeeper when Assad who arrives, which again is like kind of these really religious, kind of kooky monks. And he tells the shopkeeper to let the women from the group sleep inside the shelter and that he would sleep on the platform with the men. And he confidently tells the shopkeeper that he'd protect them from the leopard.

And if it showed up, he would take it by the mouth and tear it in half. Wow. Like those phone book guys. The phone book. Yeah, like Jeff, Jeff with the chimpanzee. No, like the strong guys at my middle school ripped the phone books. I love the phone book guys. I'll never forget the phone book guys.

And then he'll shoot a half-court shot with the leopard's car. Dude, he made it. Amazing. All right. So the shopkeeper finally gives in, he relents, and the sadu sleeps in the middle of the men on the platform outside. In the morning, the men wake up to find that the sadu is missing, and not far from where they slept, they found his blanket rumbled up and spotted of blood. When the sun rose, the shopkeeper and the men followed a blood trail across a few terrace fields to a low boundary wall, where they found the upper half of the sadu on top of the wall.

His lower half had been completely torn off and consumed. That, so leopards are smarter than we give him credit. Because it ripped him in half and he was saying he was going to rip it in half. Rip it in half. Yeah, and it grabbed the one guy that was like talking all the shit. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any theory as to why that?

Because he was sleeping in the middle of the group, right? It's, yeah, I, there's been multiple times now with this leopard where it grabs a person out of the middle. I don't understand why that is. And like anything I would say would be. Pure conjecture, but for whatever reason, I grabbed this guy. So, Jim Corbett was in a theater in his hometown in India, hundreds of miles away, watching an opera when he first heard of the leopard of Roudre Prayat. Later that night, a friend of his who was in the local government persuaded him to join

Sir William Ibitson, who is a deputy commissioner in Garwell. Remember him, he's going to come up a lot in our story in this hunt for the leopard. I forgot him, right? Yeah. William Ibitzen. I'm just going to call him Iwitzen. But I believe Corbett for sure is a, he's like a British national that was born in India. He spent his entire life in India.

I think Ibitson is kind of the same thing. Like these are white British dudes, but they've lived their entire lives in India. This is when India was still under colonial rule from the UK. I saw a movie about that. RRR. RR. R.R. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

That's the noise of leopards. make. There's leopards in it. So Jim Corbett's already famous for his exploits, hunting other man-eaters like the Champawatt Tiger, the Pinar leopard, and he is just the guy to call for this sort of thing. So he decides to journey to Rudra Pryag. He joins the hunt for the leopard, which at this point, when he joins in 1925,

it had already killed about 100 people. In the book, he gives a really good explanation of the terrain around Rudra Paiag. We talked about it a little bit, but it's really hilly. Like, if you want to visualize this story a little bit better, just look up a picture of Rudrapayag, but it's really hilly with steep hills, dense forest, and the Himalayas are like in the background. It's very kind of mountain-y, forested area,

and it's this mix of tropical and more like alpine forest almost. So there's pine trees, but then there's also like mango trees. Some of the villages in this area are completely surrounded by forests and some are surrounded by fields. And the leopard didn't really have a preference one or the other. Like it would go into either villages that are totally agricultural or ones that are surrounded by forests. There's a ton that happened while Jim Corbett was hunting this leopard enough to fill a 130-page book. We're not going to go over all of it, but I'm going to give you guys some highlights. Okay?

Let's do it. All right. Top 10. Long, top 10. Sports center top 10. Maybe a little bit more even. All right. So not long after he gets to Rooder Prajog, he spends a long night trying to lure the leopard with some goats.

And as we mentioned before, this leopard preferred human victims, but it would occasionally kill livestock too. So this isn't outside of the realm of like something that's going to work. It will kill goats every once in a while. So he's trying to lure it with goats. It would have been better to like lure him with some looers. little kids or something. Well, yeah, we're going to get to that. And it's not going to take long.

It kills, while he's trying to catch it with goats, it kills a woman on a hill overlooking, a huge valley. And he gathers up his supplies, and he heads to the village where it happened to get the story. What the story was, was this woman who was nine months pregnant, and her husband had just finished dinner that they ate around this really makeshift fireplace in their home. She had gotten up to wash their pots and pans on the door.

step and her husband decided to light his pipe and take a smoke. He had just lit his pipe when suddenly he hears a clatter of utensils and pots falling to the ground and he looks up to see his wife had disappeared. It's dark out. They knew about the leopard. He calls to her, but he doesn't get a response, so he just runs and locks the door. Oh, man. When he talks to Jim later, and Jim Corbett's always kind of like, I don't really blame these people. I kind of blame this guy, to be honest. Like, you're nine months pregnant wife suddenly disappears you got to run out and try and savor um they thought it was like a demon though they didn't understand like what a leopard was right totally and like they didn't really understand that enough pressure would cause it to let someone go or you know um in alabama

that counts as two kills for the leopard okay good to know that's true uh so he explains to jim that he didn't want to risk his own life. And Jim kind of agrees. But he does say this guy was pretty cold and that he seemed a lot more distraught about losing his unborn son than he did his wife. Oh, wow. The leopard dragged this body to a ravine not far away,

and that's where they found her remains. And Corbett decides to use her body as bait for this leopard. So he sets up a hide in an oak tree. That kind of speaks to what Jeff was just saying about using kids or whatever. He ended up using a lot of human victims. as bait. Sure. I guess that kind of makes sense

since that's what it was targeting, but still feels... Yeah, a little grim. Yeah. So he hides in a large oak tree and he sees the paw prints of this leopard. He's confident that it's the leopard that's been killing people.

And he knew that this leopard didn't often return to kills, but he was hoping he might get lucky with this woman's remains. It's kind of crazy what he did then. He sets up these bamboo poles and he ties his gun, his extra gun to these poles, and then ties a line to the trigger

and runs that line across the path. So if this leopard hits that line, it's going to be like a rifle booby trap that hopefully kills it. Oh man, there's no way that works. And then he puts a big white rock next to the woman's body, and the reason he does that is because when it gets dark, then he'll have like something that he can still see in the dark

to give him an idea of where the leopard and the body are. So if he hears it like chewing on her, he can just look at the rock, go a few feet to the left, and fire and hope he hits the leopard. So night sets in, and when night sets in, so does a big thunderstorm.

Corbett gets really wet and cold waiting for this leopard. And then he realizes the leopard is nearby, but it's also hiding from the rain because he sees it kicking up some grass. So he just knows that he's going to have to wait and hope that it finally goes and feeds on the woman After a few hours the rain finally lets up and suddenly this white rock is obscured So he knows that the leopard is standing right in front of the white rock Wow

And then he could hear the sounds of the leopard feeding but it's blocking the white rock and he can't really He doesn't know where to shoot So he waits and then the leopard moves suddenly he can see the rock again but it's not feeding on the woman So he waits again and the leopard goes in front of the rock again and he's just kind of doing this back and forth. And then finally the leopard leaves and he can hear it right underneath him in this tree. So he's trying to figure out what to do. And he's like, okay, what I'm going to do is just aim my rifle at the rock. And if this leopard blocks the rock again, I'll know it's standing there and I'll just shoot.

So he raises his rifle and just aims at the rock and is holding his rifle like that for a long time and like Jeff you have a rifle are they like super light no it's hard you get you get tired especially if you're like on a tree branch right so he's doing this and his arms are getting super tired and finally he lets his rifle down as soon as he does no leopard walks in front of this white rock that's how it works and he says this happens three times before finally he's just like so frustrated that he just fires a shot and the leopard runs off Okay, so that's his first real encounter with the man-eater of Rudra Prajog, and it's a frustrating one. Another time, Jim Corbett is camped with his men, and this campsite they pick is just kind of like out in the wilderness, and there's a large tree on the edge of the campsite.

So they do kind of what we talked about with the lines of Savo, where they get all these thorn bushes, and they surround their camp with those thorn bushes. and Corbett knows that the leopard won't go through these thorn bushes. He's feeling pretty confident about his camp. But the one thing that he's worried about is this tree, because the tree is outside of the camp and it overhangs inside of the camp. So they cut a bunch of the low branches from the tree, and he's feeling okay about it and they go to sleep. And as he's sleeping, he starts just visualizing this leopard,

climbing the tree and jumping into their camp. Sure enough, in the middle of the night, he wakes up to the sound of the leopard climbing the tree. And then he hears a large crack and he hears a bunch of people yelling. And what had happened was his cook was sleeping out on the open ground

and the cook woke up to the leopard's face above it in the tree like a pound to pounce on him. Yeah. And they had started to chop down this tree at one point and the weight of the leopard caused the tree to crack and it woke the cook up and they all shouted and the leopard ran away. Oh, wow.

Man. But before Corbett couldn't get a shot before it was gone. He didn't set up any more string traps. Did he ever take that first one down? That one could be dangerous. It's just still out there to this day. Yeah.

So we got a bunch more here. So Corbett and Ibitzen, his friend, they got another shot at the leopard in a hide. And Corbett was like about to fire and Ibitson adjusted his weight. And the hide creaked and the leopard ran off. Then the government gave them a gin trap. It's like when you farted and scared that bear, Wes.

When did they do that? Oh, yeah. I don't know. Jeff keeps telling me about it. That's my version. Yeah, it's not true, but I do. I like it. Okay.

So then the government gives them a gin trap. And a gin trap is pretty much like what you would picture a cartoon bear trap to look like. Do you guys have an explanation of what those look like? Like the... Yeah. It's like the big metal. ones that have the teeth on them that like something steps on them

and they clamp on their foot. It's like a clam but dangerous. It's one of those ones you get a lot of views if you're a YouTuber and you put it on your hand and like break your... Sure. Yeah, we should do that. Yeah. This one though, we're trying to grow our channel.

This one isn't one you'd want to do it with. There's almost five feet long. The teeth on it were three inches long and it required multiple men to set it. So it was a really big gin trap. And the leopard had killed a cow. So they decided to use this carcass for bait.

And they laid the trap exactly where they had seen the leper's paw prints as it fed on this cow. And then they placed all these thorn bushes strategically. So the leper would be forced to walk exactly where it had before. And then they retreat to a place where they can watch this cow. And as they're waiting, they suddenly hear a bunch of roars. And Corbett shines his light in the area of the king. kill and they could see a leopard that was caught in this gin trap and it's rearing up and down and it's caught and it can't get away and they're like great we caught it finally so corbett raises

his rifle to shoot the leopard fires a shot and hits the chain that connects this trap to the ground and it's seversane so the leopard now with the gin trap connected to its foot starts jumping through the field and running off and they have to wait a few hours till it's a little bit lighter they track it down and they find it and it's growling it's really upset and corbett kills it shoots it in the head and kills it and everyone starts celebrating i was going to say how did like that trap's green kill it still yeah so they start celebrating everyone's cheering and corbett's just staring at this leopard it's a large male it definitely had killed this cow and it had tried to kill some people in the neighboring village so there's really no reason for him to feel like this wasn't the right leopard but there was something

just kind of nagging at him that made him think this isn't it. He's Jim. He's Jim Corbett. He knows what he's about. Mondays. Yeah. He hates Mondays. This is not the creator of Garfield.

So they tie the leopard to sticks. They carried into the village. Ibitzen is just like beside himself. He's so happy. Because Ibitzen's like a local government official and there's a lot of pressure on him to kill this left. So he's like, this is a. He really wants the leopard dead.

Yeah. He's like the mayor and jaws kind of. Yeah, he's like, go back to work. We're good. Right. So Corbett doesn't join the celebration. He had seen this man eater before. Something made him think it wasn't this leopard.

So Ibitson, his wife, and all the people that came to see the dead leopard, they're sure that it's the man eater, so much so that they're getting in arguments with Corbett. And all he asked, Corbett said, don't tell the government that they'd killed the leopard, Just don't tell them yet, and don't tell people to, like, relax on their precautions yet. And the next night, Corbett's woken in his camp by messengers from the nearby village. A woman had been killed a few miles away by the leopard, and this nightmare is far from over. All right, so we're going to take a quick break. We're not going to do much biology today, but we are going to talk a little bit about man-eaters

and kind of some of the science behind man-eaters. Did you guys see? I was right about that song. Yeah, the Nelly Furtado line. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think you are right, we just based on your clues.

You didn't have a name or anything to attribute it to. So I'm going to say it was a draw. Yeah. Okay. All right. So we've talked a little bit about this already, but leopards are one of the few animals that have the potential to start specializing in humans.

And although there's generally extenuating circumstances that lead them to kill and start feeding on humans, they can do this. So this happened throughout history. Leopards are thought to have been one of the few primary predators for early man, which we mentioned. And as we developed better and better shelter, better and better technology, we kind of removed ourselves from their menu.

But there are times, like from time to time, there are still leopards to become human specialists, and they can do a lot of damage when they do. So the Pinar leopard is one we brought up already. It was one of the ones that Jim Corbett had. hunted before this leopard. It's considered to be the second most prolific man-eater after the Champawatt Tiger, and it's thought to have killed over 400 people in India before it was finally killed by our guy.

Yeah. That's so crazy. It's a lot of people. There's a single leopard? A single leopard. And it was so bold that it was even recorded. I couldn't even eat it like one person, I don't think. Oh, if you, dude, if you were in the right situation.

And it wasn't, it wasn't eaten like all. All of them. It's just eating like the vitals and stuff, I think. Right. Like some of the people that they kill, even like this, this Ruripayaoag leopard, it's just eating the parts of it wants than leaving the rest of the carcass. Like you could kill 400 people, Mike, and just eat like a little bit. Yeah, maybe you just want to eat like the pinky finger. Right. This leopard, the Pinar leopard was so bold that it was even recorded to play the game of Tugawar war

with a man when it grabbed his wife by the, the neck and he grabbed her arm. Oh, wow. The two were just like pulling on this poor woman and the leopard finally let her go, but she died later. Some other notable man-eating leopards are the leopard of the central provinces, which killed about 150 people in India. The leopard of Guma Lepur, which killed about 40-ish people.

The leopard of the Golus range in Africa, northern Somalia, killed about 100 people. And then there's a bunch of other ones that you can read about. There's a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to them. leopards can be pretty prolific man-eaters though they're very careful about it well i kind of had an idea but i didn't know the extent yeah yeah after part one i would have been shocked had you had no idea yeah it would have been surreal you never heard of this this is kind of a crazy stat between 1875 and 1912 the british colonial government in india attributed about 12,000 human deaths to leopards.

No way. So that's like a 30, what is that? 37 year period. 12,000 deaths to human, or human deaths to leopards. Which seems crazy, but then when you think about it, if one leopard can kill 400 people, that could be possible.

Yeah, and we didn't have, like, as good of, like, things to protect ourselves. Exactly. Especially in those areas. In some parts of India, leopards are still responsible for more human deaths than all of the large carnivores combined. So that includes bears, tigers, wolves. That's largely due to their tolerance to human presence and their ability to survive in shoulder habitat near human civilizations. So really, like, of the big cats, there's two species that can live in a pretty urban environment.

And that's leopards and mountain lions. Both of them can do pretty well, like right on the fringes of even. even really big cities like Los Angeles or Mumbai. So there's a lot of hypotheses out there for why leopards and other large cats will start feeding on humans. There's a study done on the skulls of man-eating lions, which included the Savo man-eaters. And they found that about 40% of those skulls had significant dental issues. I think we talked about that pretty extensively in the Savo episode, but they would see

that they had like big canine problems or, you know, dental problems that would maybe cause them to switch to easier prey. I'm going to go out on a little bit of a limb here now, though. I'm going to say my personal opinion, which isn't totally based on everything that we've learned, but it is based on research and a lot of the experts that are a lot smarter than me when it comes to this stuff. So I think it's a combination of factors that leads to cats initiating this kind of man-eating behavior. I think it can be everything from depleted prey, bad habitat, diseases, injuries, or dental problems. But I kind of just think it's like a cat that decides to specialize in people.

Like I don't really think there needs to be an extenuating circumstance. I think sometimes it's just a cat that's like, you know what, I'm going to try eating this thing. It figures out that it's easy and then it just keeps doing it. And like I think the evidence for that is like this leopard or the lines of Savo could have easily, specialized in cattle or goats or some other easy prey, but they decided to go for humans. And the leopard even turned down like goats to go after humans. So for me, it just kind of makes sense that some of these cats just decide, this is what I want to eat. It's what I'm going to eat. Yeah. That's why I'm more of a cat guy than a dog guy. Yeah. Yeah. You like their independent. You like spirit. Yeah,

you got you got to really earn their love, you know? Or that's the killer. you. So the other thing I wanted to bring up. When you said that you were going out on a limb on that one, I pictured you like a leopard out on the limb of a tree. Yeah. Or hunched. Yeah.

Hiding in his tree. So my one last thing that I kind of think is a bit of opinion. I didn't read this in any of the research, but someone's probably talked about this. I think the reason we don't see a lot more of this, the reason we're not seeing a lot more big cats that become man eaters is because we actively see. select against it. So when a leopard or a lion or a tiger starts switching to humans and learning how to best hunt and kill humans, they don't live very long because we will hunt down and kill that animal. So whatever combination of genes and behaviors and whatnot led to that animal

deciding to hunt humans is removed from the population and aren't bred into the next generation. So I think if we allowed this behavior to continue over and over and over again, you have leopards that are teaching their cubs how to hunt humans. They're passing on those genes, and it becomes a much more common kind of specialization, but we actively select against it. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah.

Perfect sense. Okay. It's like we shouldn't to let Ted Bundy have a kid when he is in jail for murdering 100 people, but we did. Yeah, we should have probably. Yeah. There is some truth to that though. Like we talked about that in Yellowstone with problem bears. Like when you remove those problem bears from a population, you're also removing the genes that kind of caused them to do that in the first place. And you do tend to get better behaved bears over time. And I think we've kind of done that. Because they don't like teach their kids. They like teach their cubs be afraid of humans and stuff like that. Right. And the large percentage of these man eaters are males. But, there's still genes that have caused them to be that bold to decide to check out humans as prey. And those are genes that they potentially would have passed to offspring.

So I do think that's a big reason this doesn't happen a lot more than it does. But there's probably a big cat biologists out there right now, shaking their head. SMH in. Yeah. Yeah. All right. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting.

a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best heavyweight in the world, Frances Ngano versus Felipe Lenz. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Okay, so that's it. We're going to go back to our story because we have a lot to get through still.

about halfway there. But as we had just mentioned, this leopard had killed a girl, and the hunters knew that they hadn't gotten the right animal. Corbett had killed that other leopard, but now another person's dead, and he knows we didn't get the right one. Yeah. So they went to inspect the body of the girl that the leopard killed, and that put a quick end to their celebrations.

When they saw the body, she was lying face down. All of her clothing had been removed, and she'd been licked head-to-toe by the leopard because their skin was raw and bleeding. Leopards have... That's a high in tongue. Yeah. Can't trust a word this leopard says.

She had four large puncture marks in her neck and the leopard had eaten a few pounds of flesh from her body and then left the rest. So they slowly pieced together what had happened. She lived in a small one-room house with her husband and a six-month-old child. The husband had to leave for a bit so his dad was staying in the house

with his wife and their new baby. They'd just finished dinner. and she went outside to relieve herself and never came back. A few minutes later, the father-in-law got pretty nervous, so he called outside, and then when he didn't get a response, he got up and locked the door. The leopard had been waiting behind a large rock near the house, and when the girl squatted down, it snuck forward and pounced,

grabbed her by the neck, and killed her quickly by severing the vertebrae between her head and her body. Corbett had been right, and this man-eating leopard was still at large. I hate this leopard. I can't say that. You know how like I disapprove of what it's choosing to do. People will like poop when they die? Yeah.

Well, if you just poop, do you think you poop again? I probably could. I could probably work out another poop. Yeah, I think for sure. Yeah. Interesting. That's interesting. I'll have to look into that.

Maybe this leopard didn't like eating people covered in poop so it would wait until they just pooped. And then I would kill them. Yeah. Yeah. I do like when as I read through this book I did kind of think part of this leopard strategy was just waiting outside of people's houses at night because it knew that people would come out to go to the bathroom most of these people didn't have bathrooms in their homes yeah so it would it just would wait and wait sometimes for a few nights until someone would finally come out at night

and then it would grab them so it was very smart it had learned our behaviors and it knew how to predict them they should have just did what Jeff did establish a pee corner and just you don't even have to leave your room just pee right in your on your carpet. 14. Yeah. 14's crazy to be doing that. It's bad.

When I first heard that story, I was like, what were you? Like six? Nope. No. You were 14. You were peeing in the corner multiple times? A lot until you haven't heard this? We have a broken drain in the house.

I was like, dad, I got to tell you something. I do think you've told that before, but I didn't realize. I thought it was like one time. I didn't realize. I think I was like 12. Okay. But yeah, it was too old. Yeah.

Because like I just couldn't sleep and I was peeing like every five minutes. Yeah. And I don't know what was going on. Way to be honest. I think I would have just stopped if I never told anyone. Yeah. Dad was not. He was, you know, he put up with like my bad grades.

you know, kept quiet, but for that one, he had to kind of be like, come on, man. Yeah, I don't blame it. All right. So Corbett and Ibitson had a really terrifying night where the leopard ended up hunting them, gave them both a really bad scare. He had another really frustrating experience where he found a cow that the leopard had killed, once again put the gin trap in like the perfect spot where his obvious that the leopard had stood, and then covered it up so it looked like he hadn't even moved a single twig.

it looked perfect. Yeah. And he's really proud of himself. But when he returned, the cow was gone. The entire area had been walked on aside from where the trap was. So neat. And he could see that the leopard had spread its legs and stood on the arms of the trap, but never once stood on the tree. Oh, wow.

That's amazing. So he starts feeling, oh, go ahead. It's like kind of funny, just like thinking like in and out. If there's a long line, I'm just like, oh, this sucks. like I have to wait to eat. And this leopard just waits like five hours outside of someone's house for them to go to the bathroom. And that's like they don't mind, you know?

Super patient. Yeah. And then they just eat until they're completely full and they can go a few more days. But yeah. So he's feeling really dejected. And he's saying that he feels inferior to this leopard. So he decides he needs to get a refresh. So he goes home and he's just like, I'm going to regroup.

And then I'm going to return as soon as I'm in. able to. This leopard had really just won round one with Corvette. So he's gone three months and during those months, ten more people are killed. Oh wow. One of the worst stories was a woman that had been grabbed in her house by

the leopard and it's dragging her out of the house by her leg and as she's being dragged out, this is one of the few people that was able to fight back. She grabs this long cutting tool that they used to cut grass and she hits the leopard with it and it causes it to back off a little but it's still holding

her leg, but it backed off enough to where there was a dividing door that she shut. So just her leg was like sticking through the door and she could kind of hold it closed and the leopard couldn't get it her whole body. And she was doing that and the leopard kept trying to pull her through and it couldn't. And finally the leopard got so angry that it ripped her leg off of her body. Oh, God. And ran off with her leg. And she died from bleeding to death. All right. So I think it's a good thought experiment though to think about this to really think like put yourself in these people's shoes you live in a little one room house that your door is just like protected by a little wooden latch or something and people your neighbors are having their legs ripped off in their houses by this leopard there's villages where literally every single door and window had scratch marks from this leopard trying to get inside every single person had had close calls with this leopard almost in some places.

That's unreal. So you can't, I mean, I was sitting in my room last night doing research thinking, how would I feel if just at any minute a leopard could bust through the door and drag me out in the night and kill me? Like, you would just always be on edge. So I really don't blame them for being as terrified as they were. That's why I have a rifle. In case a leopard busts in.

Got them at the zoo. The zoo's not too far away. Yeah, there's going to be like some gun nuts. You are a gun guy, so you can tell me if this is true. We're going to have some gun nuts after this episode. They're going to be like, see, I got a red intent. I don't even know what my gun is. All right.

So a couple more stories about the leopard and the hunt for the leopard. One time they bought a goat that happened to be an extremely loud and vocal goat, and they tied it up near the forest edge, Corbett and Ibitz. T-Rex style. Yeah. The goat's calling and calling, and suddenly it stops and just stares into the woods in one spot. So Corbett whispers to Ibbetson. Ibiton has a really good scope on his rifle. He says, look for it. It's there. Ibson can't find it. Then Corbett looks through his binoes. He can't find it. But the goat's just staring at one spot. Finally, the light fades enough that they like have to give up. So they go and free this goat and it runs up the trail from them.

And it had been really loud and it was really good. goat so they didn't want to lose this goat so they chase after it and the goats kind of zinging and zagging up this trail and it goes around a bend where they can't see it so they run up to grab it and it's gone and they look up on the hillside and they can't find it and they're like maybe looking for 20 seconds and they turn around and they start walking back on the trail and they see something white on the trail and corbett runs up and it's the goat it's dead it has puncture marks in its throat and it's been laid across the trail and he says it's a steep trail and it had been laid in the only way that it could be laid

to where it wouldn't roll down the trail. And he imagined it was like the leopard saying, here, if you want your goat so badly, take it. And it's now dark and you have a long way to go. We will see which of you will live to reach the village. Oh, wow. Yeah. So they've got a regroup again after that one.

This, he, yeah, leopards win a mental game. Three months is crazy. Three more months. You guys can just die. for three months. He touched the go and it was still warm and its muscles were still twitching. That's how recently had been killed.

Dude. They had a box of matches that they were lighting the whole way to get back to the village, but they were pretty scared on the way back. Not long after the leopard kills another man and Corbett and Ibbets and poisoned the carcass with cyanide

and the leopard ate a huge dose of the poison but still didn't die. There was an incident where Corbett started to buy into the idea that the leopard might be something more than just a regular animal, something supernatural. And it's a pretty crazy one. So this is like, of all the stories that I read of the ways that the leopard evaded them, this one was just crazy to me. So the leopard had grabbed a 70-year-old woman as she was closing the door to her house and dragged her

through the street of her village. And she's screaming and trying to push away its face. And everyone's closing their doors because they, no one wants to mess with this leopard at this point. drags her through the village, kills her, and leaves her up against this rose bush. So the next day when Corbett and Ibiton follow the blood trail,

they find the naked body of the 70-year-old woman and she's covered in all these white rose petals. And they said it was really grim and looked like something out of a Gothic opera or something. It was especially offensive to them because it was this old woman who had been pulled out of her home. And they decide to use the body as a lure

and they're going to just really booby-trap. this scene. So they set up two of those rifle booby traps. And Ibitson's rifle has a hair trigger. Like if the slightest thing hits this trigger, it fires. So they put like very carefully this thread on it. And then they tie the lines to the body. So they're thinking like the leopard comes in. If it moves this body at all in the wrong direction, it'll get shot. Then they poison her corpse. They put tons of cyanide all through her corpse. The only places they really don't put it are the head and the neck. And then they also put a big gin trap and a flat spot in front of the body.

And then they spend all these time, like this time planting thorn brushes and all these places. So the leopard has to come in from the direction where there's all these booby traps, the gin trap, everything. Yeah. So they're like Corbett says a rat couldn't get to this body without getting killed. They're trying to. Kevin McAllister it.

They are, yeah. So then they go to a nearby tree, and they're also hoping for a shot at the leopard while it's approaching. They don't get their shot because it gets dark, but they're still hopeful that this leopard's going to get killed by all these booby tracks. The hot iron falling on its face. Yeah, broken Christmas ornaments. So it starts to rain, and Corbett gets really worried.

He tells Ivinson, he's worried that the weight of the water on these lines, is going to cause this hair trigger to go off, or this trigger on the gin trap is really delicate, so he's worried the increased weight on the trigger might cause it to go off. And Ibbetson gets kind of pissed at him, because he's like, you're a rotten pessimist. I can't believe you're, like, telling me

that the water is going to cause this stuff to go off. And Corbett's like, I kind of deserved it, to be honest. Like, he's like, this leopard is really in my dome at this point. Sure. So they're whispering to each other and suddenly roars he erupt from the jungle. they knew that this gin trap had grabbed the leopard and they get really excited and then suddenly it gets quiet

and again Corbett's worried that maybe something hadn't worked and the trap had just been set off and Ibitson's like no we got him quit being so negative but as they approach the area with the body and the traps Ibitson also starts to get a little worried

by how quiet it is they get a surge of hope when they see that there's a big hole in the ground where the gin trap used to be where they had buried it. So the gin trap had definitely gone off But then their hopes crashed down When they see the gin trap laying about 10 feet away

With its jaws closed shut and no leopard in the gin trap So they go back to the tree to sleep And they wait for daylight to inspect the scene and see what went wrong What they found was that the leopard had uprooted the thorn bushes That they had placed around the woman It had dug them up and moved them It had dragged the body of this woman toward the rifles so it put slack in the lines

instead of pulling them tauts so they'd go off it dragged them toward the rifles it then ate the body around the lines that they had tied on the body so it never it ate like literally the lines were left untouched but it ate all over the other body and it avoided all the places where they'd put the cyanide so it ate the face the neck

and then ate literally around the cyanide capsules that they had placed in this woman's body and then the craziest thing is Corbett thinks that the leopard as it was leaving, did I say lion earlier? I might have. Sorry if I said lion. Or maybe I'm just saying line and I'm getting confused.

Anyway, it's been a long night. As the leopard was leaving the area and stepping over the trap, Corbett thinks it might have gone off from either the leopard brushing it or the weight of the rain and it closed on the leg of the leopard. But the crazy thing is, a few days ago some of his men had dropped this trap And one of the teeth on this trap broke off and that's where the leopard got caught. So there was a gap in the teeth and that's where it caught his leg. And it was able to escape because that's where it pinched it.

And they knew that was true because it left a little bit of hair and tissue right in that gap. So Corbett's like, he's SMH in, you know, he's like, this leopard has got my number. And he really is starting. When he talked about this, he's like, I wouldn't tell this. story, but there was other people there and they witnessed it too, and it's just like almost too unreal to believe. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your

financial accounts, we alert you right away all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. So the leopard made what would be its last human kill on the 14th of April 1926. A widow and her two children, a 12-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl were walking up some steps on the side of their house with a neighbor boy. The neighbor boy looked through the window on the first floor and saw an animal lying on the floor of the open room, which he mistook for a dog, so he didn't tell anyone that he had seen something.

All four of the group were carrying brass vessels for water that they had collected from the spring, and the 12-year-old son of this widow was in the back of the line as they walked up these stairs. Suddenly, the widow hears his brass vessel clang to the ground, and she turns around to yell at him, and he's completely gone. She walks to the bottom of the stairs, she picks up this vessel, she looks around,

and she's thinking that he had dropped it, and then gotten really scared that she was going to get mad. So he just ran into the bottom floor of one of these houses. So she starts looking for him and yelling for him, not really worried yet. And then a neighbor comes out, lights a lantern because it's starting to get dark, and holds it by the ground, and they see some big splashes of blood.

So she starts to get pretty worried. Then they follow these blood splashes, and they see the tracks of the leopard, and she absolutely loses it, and starts screaming and wailing and grief. The next morning Corbett and Ibbetson show up and they track down the body. So Corbett knows the leopards operating in this area. He stakes the boy's body down and he heaps up some straw for a little shooting platform

and he waits for the leopard in the pitch dark. So I'm going to read you guys a quick section from this little hunt of his that I found very interesting. The straw that had been provided for me was as dry as tinder and my ears, straining into the black darkness, first heard the sound when it was level with my my feet. Something was creeping, very stealthily creeping over the straw on which I was lying. I was wearing an article of clothing called shorts, which left my legs bare in the region of my knees. I'm familiar with those. Presently against this bear skin, I felt the hairy coat of an animal brushing. It could only be the man-eater creeping up until he could lean over and get a grip

on my throat. A little pressure now on my left shoulder to get a foot hold, and then just as I was about to press the trigger of the rifle to cause a diversion. A small animal jumped down between my arms and my chest. It was a little kitten soaking wet that had been caught out in the storm and finding every door shut had come to me for warmth and protection.

What? So he spends the rest of this night staked out with this kitten, and as they're waiting, they actually hear the leopard start feeding on the boy, and then another leopard comes in and they fight. And Corbett's just like, oh, kill it.

kill this leopard. He's hoping that this other maybe male dominant leopard will kill it. And the next morning he gets up, he inspects, and there's no dead leopard, the boy's been eaten. But he does find the tracks of the leopard, the man-eating leopard, running back toward Ruehri-Pryag village, which is where he's heading as well. He's not very good at like shooting in the dark, is he? He's not. He doesn't have, he actually says that he's really good at seeing in the dark, which I believe because he's got crazy eyes. But he just, there's no like ambient light. A lot of these nights, especially cloudy nights. There's not like electricity or anything.

So it's really dark. But it just seems like he like set up the hay or the straw or whatever by the body. So he could shoot the leopard if it starts eating the body. And then it starts eating the body and he doesn't shoot. Yeah. Again, this isn't a massive animal though. And he wants to make sure that he gets it, you know? Because if he shoots at it every time it comes up on a body, it's going to stop feeding on bodies that it's killed.

And it's going to give him less and less operative. It's going to get smarter. Yeah. The more times he messes up, the smarter this leopard gets. But he's messed up quite a bit. So I bet sin his friend had been traveling, but he joins Corbett and Rudra-Pry-Yag. And Corbett tells him he's doing one last Hail Mary. He knows that the leopard's been traveling the road between Gola, Bria, India, and Rubez.

Rudra Pryag at least every five days, and Corbett decides he's going to set up a hide in a mango tree along the road, and he's going to wait 10 nights for this leopard. So for 10 nights in a row, he's going to go up in this mango tree and hope the leopard comes by, and he's going to stake a goat out as bait. If the leopard doesn't show in those 10 nights, or if he's not able to get a shot, the two men agree that they're going to give up. Ibitzen had been, like, putting off his job and stuff's piling up back in his hometown and then Corbett was supposed to be in Africa like months ago but he's been putting everything off to try and kill this leopard

and it had really they knew that it had gotten their heads and they just thought maybe fresh eyes is what this thing needs like a new brain and fresh eyes because we're just like this leopard is beating us at every turn so this is going to be their last hurrah Corbett sets up a hide near the house of a friend of his on the road who's actually one of the only people that survived an encounter with the leopard. The guy had a lot of scars to prove it. And he starts his long wait. And each night he ties up a goat nearby and then he sits up in the tree all night. And then when it was light, two of his

men would come and get him and then go sleep during the day. So he does that for his 10 nights. No sign of the leopard. But in the meantime, it kills a goat and a sheep in the nearby village and tries to break into several people's homes. So the 10, That's illegal. Yeah, you're not allowed to do that. Breaking and entering. The 10 nights pass and Corbett returns to talk with Ibitson, and they both decide they're quitting.

So they make their preparations to leave the next day. Each man is going to go home to their respective homes and go on with their lives. And they do, and the leopard kills 10,000 more people, and that's the end of the story. I was going to say, if I were one of those villagers, that would be pretty just devastated that, like, this guy came in. He's like, this is the guy. If there's one person that can handle this, it's Jim. And he's like, I quit.

And you're just kind of left to your own devices. He is like the guy. This is world famous too. At this point, this leopard is by far the most any animal's ever been reported on in international news. Like, everyone knows about this one. And they just can't kill it. Yeah. And everywhere he goes, these people are still so hopeful.

Like he is their savior. He is going to kill this. Sleppard. Even at this point, people still believe in him so strongly. So he's depressed. Like, this is really getting to him. And one thing I really like about Corbett is sometimes when you read these accounts from these like great white hunter people, they're pretty racist and they're like kind of,

they're so egotistical and like believe so much in their prowess as a hunter. Corbett's very humble and never once in this book did I read any really outright. racism. Like I think he really, he grew up in India. I think he loves the people of India. He saw them as like his people and he really felt terrible that he couldn't help these people with this marauding leopard. But so they decide they're going to quit. But he's got one more night in Ruehra Praya. He's like, my birthday's coming up. I want to go see my friends. Also the mental tax of just knowing that this leopard could kill him too. Like he often imagined it coming and killing him. Well, yeah, he thought the kitten was the cat.

Yeah. Yeah. But he's got one more night and he says, what the hell? I'll go up in the mango tree this last night because I'm leaving tomorrow. Might as well. So around 9 p.m., he's in this tree and he sees a man leave a pilgrim shelter nearby with the lamp. And the man walks to the edge of the forest to pee. And when he walks back, he puts out his lamp and immediately some dogs nearby start barking. And Corbett knows that these are dogs that are barking at a left.

leopard, and that this leopard had seen the man come out and was probably stalking him and was going to go to the pilgrim shelter and try and pull someone out of the shelter. Then the dogs turn in his direction and start barking right toward his tree. So now Corbett thinks, okay, this leopard's nearby. He's got his goat out there, and he's thinking this leopard's probably right at the bottom of the tree, and it's deciding whether or not it's going to go to the pilgrim shelter and pull another human out or it's going to kill this goat. The dogs go quiet and there's this long period of quiet where he still is trying to figure out what the leopard's going to do and he's thinking it's

probably going to go to the shelter because the dogs don't start barking again and he doesn't hear anything from the goat. It's only about 20 feet to where the goat is but it's so dark that he can't see this white goat. So he closes his eyes to listen for any sound that might give away the position of the leopard. So he's holding his gun. He's got his eyes closed and he's got like a first generation flashlight strapped to his rifle. This flashlight hardly ever works. It's really fickle. But he's going to use it if he gets the chance. So he's sitting in total silence with his eyes closed for a while. He's wondering if the leopard had gone to get a human when suddenly he hears a rushing sound beneath him and the tinkle of the goat's bell.

So he opens his eyes, he flicks on the flashlight and as he flicks it on, he gets this brief glimpse of the shoulder of the leopard on top of the goat. And as he squeezes the trigger, the flashlight goes off. No. So the shot rings through the night and he's sitting in total darkness not knowing if he'd hit the leopard or not. He doesn't hear a sound. He doesn't hear it growling or yowling or anything like that.

And he knows all I can do is wait. His friend in the nearby house hears the shot. He opens his door and starts yelling to Corbett asking if he needs to help and Corbett doesn't answer because he's still just listening for any sound that he might have gotten this leopard. So he waits throughout the night and when the first bit of light starts in the morning, he climbs down the tree and is greeted by a friendly bleat from the goat. So the goat's still alive. Just beyond the goat, there's a streak of blood that led down to the edge of the road and then into the jungle. It's a lot of blood. So Corbett knows that if he hit this leopard,

if this leopard's blood, it's probably dead. So he decides to climb up. down on his own and investigate. Fifty yards away, the leopard was dead in a small hole in the ground. It's chin resting on the edge of the hole. Wow. All right. So Corbett had something to say about this dead leopard. And hopefully it doesn't make me emotional because I actually thought it was like really

beautiful what he said. And I'm going to read it to you guys. This leopard had been killing people for eight years. It had like done a total number on his mental health. he had every reason to view this as like a total monster, and this is what he wrote. No marks by which I could identify the dead animal were visible. Even so I had never for one moment doubted that the leopard in the hole was the man-eater.

But here was no fiend, who, while watching me through the long night hours, had rocked and rolled with silent fiendish laughter at my vain attempts to outwit him and licked his lips in anticipation of the time when finding me off my guard for one brief moment, he would get the opportunity he was waiting for of burying his teeth in my throat. Here was only an old leopard, who differed from the others of his kind, and that his muzzle was gray, and his lips lacked whiskers. The best hated and the most feared animal in all of India,

whose only crime, not against the laws of nature, but against the laws of man, was that he had shed human blood, with no object of terrorizing man, but only in order that he might live, and who now with his chin resting on the rim of the hole and his eyes half closed was peacefully sleeping his long last sleep. Wow. Which I really like. Like he had every reason to call this leopard a monster and say, you know, I vanquished it and I've killed it.

And all he said was this was just a leopard that had figured out that it was going to eat people. It wasn't terrorizing people on purpose. It was just hunting. You know, that's what leopards do. This was its life. And it decided to, you know, switch prey species. And that's it. Like, that's what this was.

And I love that Corbett in 1926 had that insight. And that he wasn't like, I've killed this monster. He's like, no, I killed a leopard that was doing what leopards do. Yeah. That's a beautiful sentiment. It really is. Ibitzen was much less introspective about it. When they brought the leopard to Ivetson, he cheered and ran up.

up and hugged Corbett and was just like beside himself. Some of the other villagers that showed up, put their hands up in the air and then fell to Corbett's feet and were like thanking him by like pretty much like falling at his feet. And they all got just very, very happy that they could finally relax, which I also don't blame them at all. No. For that reaction. So they measured the leopard.

They found it to be healthy and they inspected it. They found it to be healthy aside from some wounds from its fight with the other leopard. A broken canine, some recessed gums, and a missing toe where it had been shot four years previous on the bridge. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that, the toe. Yeah. Oh. They took it to the nearby marketplace, and they had kind of a viewing where people could come see it.

And Corbett describes it as the most intense display of gratitude he had ever seen in his life. Wow. Like everyone had a story about this leopard, the people that it had taken from them, and they all just cried and were so happy. One funny last little anecdote is about the goat that he had that night. That goat became a local hero. Oh, nice. People made this really fine, nice brass collar for it, and people would come visit it.

And the owner of the goat, actually, it became like a source of revenue for him. That's awesome. So cool. Little Sebastian. Yeah. That's crazy. That was the final night.

Corbatt was planning on being there. Just, dude, it's so crazy. Fourth quarter buzzer beater to win it all. And honestly, like, from reading his book, I don't get the impression that he was one to really tell tall tales. I really think it's pretty factual. And I do think that was actually his plan. Like, I'm not, I don't think he wrote that because it makes sense, you know, like a better story. Yeah.

I think he actually was going to leave the next day. and he just managed to kill it the last night. That's like a Robert Ory buzzer beat or the, because it's like, it's not like Kobe or Steph where he's making shots throughout the game. It's just, he made one shot at the very end. Big shot, Bob. Yeah.

Yeah, pretty crazy. All right, so that's the story of the leopard of Rudra Prajog. It's pretty crazy. You guys got any questions about it? How, so wait, what was the total this one leopard killed again? Officially 125 people. Corbett thinks it was much closer to 200 just because a lot of people weren't counted. And then people that died as a result of their wounds weren't counted as victims either. Okay.

Yeah. It's crazy. It is. It's wild. But a really good story. I do think if you have the patience to kind of read a book that's not written with a ton of prose, his book is really interesting. I really did enjoy it. Why do you think they haven't made a movie about this?

I don't know. It was actually something I thought about quite a bit. I know there's a BBC series where they did an episode dedicated to it that was like a reenactment, but they just kind of went off the rails and it was very fictitious. I think someone could follow this book pretty much to the letter and make a really interesting movie or like five-part series. If anyone has like a connection to Hollywood, let us know. West could definitely help with a leopard. movie. I was going to say maybe they just can't find a guy that's cool enough to play Jim Corbett.

But we just have Wes do it. Just get Wes in that leaving. I'll wear shorts. Yeah. I'll wear your little khaki shorts. I don't know if they were khaki, but they had to have been, right? Probably. It's not like he was wearing jorts, right? I'm really glad we did this because I think I had this preconceived notion of who Jim Corbett was, and I did see him as like the great white hunter kind of boisterous colonizing. guy that came in there and just like pretended to be the best person to ever live. And that's not at all who he was. From what I gather from his book is he was really kind and really cared about wildlife.

And so much so that he stopped hunting and started photographing wildlife. Oh, that's awesome. He's national parks named after him. Yeah. Stop shooting bullets and started shooting picks. Yeah. That's a good. Exactly.

Good arc. Well, and like part of it too, I think just especially in that time period is like, people from England or like people from like those areas they're the ones who had guns and knew how to use guns and that's just like and they just had more ways to efficiently hunt you know yeah there were like 4,000 Indian nationals that had guns in garwhal though too so I do like I think I think what you're saying is like they had they had the privilege of being brought up in places where they had the time to like go out and be trained how to hunt. Yeah. With efficient weapons. Right. I do agree with you in that.

The advanced warfare tactic of tying a string to a gun. That's something only the English we're doing back then. If we ever go to India together. If we ever go to India together, I do want to go to Jim Corbett National Park. It's a great place to see tigers. Sure. So it would be fun to go. All right.

All right. Indiana is where that all took place? No, India. Did I say Indiana? Oh, I've been convinced this whole time. I put a lot of hours in this one. Yeah, okay. They should be the Indianapolis leopards instead of colds for sure because of it. This is one of that guy's leopards that got loose in Ohio.

All right. Okay. Let's move on to our category. So it's going to be an interesting category week this week. We did most of our leopard ones last week For the sake of not being too repetitive We're going to get into our March Madness tournament A little early

All right Yes Who's doing that? You are Jeff What? Remember? Let me just minimize this So I did a smash bet

To decide the order And it went west Then Mike and then me And we're going to do its characters Do you remember? I was Young Link That's a bad one You don't want that one

You were a villager Mike And West was Yoshi Okay A Yoshi win Yeah Blue Yoshi All right Okay

So I got rocked too I lost so fast Yeah So this is how I'm gonna do We're gonna This is just a taste The The subscribers are gonna get

the whole meal, right? Yeah, right. So we're going to do... This is like the amount of the body that Mike could eat of the 400 people. We're going to do a little bit of the Land Mammel and creepy crawler section. We're saving water and air for subscribers. But how it's going to work, it's a 200-pound death match tournament. And like the arena's going to be Hunger Game style where there's like a lot of different elements.

It's probably no weapons, though, but like, you know, just like water and trees and like a big cage is kind of what I'm saying. And when you say 200 pounds, you mean every single one of these animals weighs exactly 200 pounds. Right. It's the size they would be if they were 200 pounds. Yeah. So it's kind of just like the purpose of that is seeing what animal would be the most efficient killer if they all weighed the same. Right. Like a spider would be in crazy.

least to 200 pounds and a blue whale would be decreased to 200 pounds. Yeah, exactly. And if you don't like the thought of like animals killing each other, just think of it as like a holographic thing or something. I don't know. Use your imagination. It's your friendly competition. They don't kill each other.

They just to submission. Dominate. All right. So, and last rule, we're going to take turns choosing the winner, but if the two people not choosing agree to disagree with what the person chose, then that's what sticks. Yeah. So. Okay.

Me and Mike before this decided that we will always agree. So just so. Oh, perfect. So I'll just choose the one I actually don't want. There you go. All right. So let's, enough talk and enough rules. Who cares about rules?

First rule of fight club is there is no rules. That's Calvin Ball. But, Wes, let's get this thing started in the land mammal, round one. Wolverine versus polar bear. We've already heard you say a Wolverine killed a full-grown polar bear. But then we're like, that's probably a lie. But anyways, 200-pound Wolverine versus 200-pound polar bear. Who you take it?

I'm going to take the Wolverine. Okay. I think just their reputation being so ferocious. and so energetic and bold, I think that it wins this fight with the polar bear. I think also when you make a Wolverine that big, its claws are huge. The polar bear's claws get smaller and everything.

So, yeah, I think the Wolverine has better tools and is going to beat the polar bear when they're both 200 pounds. And Wolverines weigh like 20 to 55 pounds. Polar bears weigh females to males. it's like 330 pounds to like over 1,000 pounds. So. Yeah, males get up to 1,500 pounds. So it's a big reduction for the polar bear and a big bump up for the polar bear.

Like a smaller female one so it doesn't lose too much of its stuff, but still. Yeah, but I mean, it doesn't matter, right? That's the whole, that's the whole thing is they're 200 pounds regardless. It's the male of male, right? Yeah. No arguments for me. No, I agree. Okay.

Wolverine moves on. Okay. Mike, you got coyote versus cheetah. Oh, I'm going with cheetah. Oh, what's your reasoning? They just seem a little more predisposed to dispatching prey to me, at least like bigger-sized prey. Coyotes weigh 15 to 46 pounds,

cheetahs weigh 46 to 160. So the coyote's getting a bigger boost. I still think the cheetah has a little more athleticism at its dispossil. And that's what's going to put it over the top for me. Run circles around it until it gets dizzy. Right. I agree with you. Coyotes don't really, they're like other dogs and that they're not necessarily like killing prey, like big prey with like a stranglehold.

But a cheetah will. A cheetah will bite through the windpipe and kill something pretty quickly. So I think this is a pretty good fight until that cheetah gets the coyote's windpipe and then I think it's over. And the cheetah is a lot faster too. I would have picked coyote, but that whole running circles around them, I convinced myself, Cheetah. Good. All right, so I got Leopard, and then I'm specifying that it's a black panther. Okay, cool.

Vers a North American striped skunk. So that skunk's going to put out some serious stink. But they don't really have that good of weapons compared to a panther. Panthers, you can get one up to like 160 pounds. So, I mean, just give them a little bit more boost. Like, it's got to be the panther here, right? Yeah, we, I mean, in our story, that leopard was killing full grown cows. Like, you think there's skunks smell could knock the leopard out?

No, but like, I have seen, I've seen grizzly bears run away from skunks. Yeah. So I think initially this leopard is running from the skunk. But one of them has to win, right? Like, that's the whole basis to this is, like, they're not let out of hunger games until one of them kills each other. Yeah. So I think if it comes down to it, the leopard is going to win. Leopards can do handsstands.

The skunk is going to be 20 times bigger than what they are. So that's like 20 times more stank. Yeah. So I'm going to say skunk knocks him out with the smell and then kills them. So I'm going skunk, actually. I'm on Wes's side. So. Okay.

So it's bad. You try it, Jeff. Okay. Yeah. I don't, I think, I don't think it knocks it out. I was thinking leopard and then I convinced myself of the skunk. You know what's a funny thing about the Corbett book is he didn't think leopards had a sense of smell, which is pretty wild.

Oh, really? Really? Yeah. Yeah. Back then they thought that they didn't really have a sense of smell. They do. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Could I definitely use that to his advantage had he not thought that way. Wes, you got Honey Badger. Honey Badgers, what don't they give, Wes? A flak. Right. Versus Spider Monkey.

So Honey Badgers are like 11 to 35 pounds, so they're getting like, you know, 15 to 20 times bigger. Spider monkeys are only four pounds, so they're getting like 40 times bigger. Yeah. Yeah. That puts the spider monkey the size of like a small gorilla. Yeah. But then the honey badger is also that big. That would make the honey badger look like a small grizzly bear.

So I, the spider monkey has, yeah, this is a good one. The spider monkey has really great agility. It's smarter. The honey badger has better weapons and better protection. They're really well protected animals. They're hard to kill. They're more used to like, combat than a spider.

They are really smart too. I just watched this video on how this guy who had a captive honey badger simply could not come up with an enclosure that could keep this honey badger in. It would like pile rocks on the wall to climb out or it would like stack logs to get out. It was so smart. So I think I'm sticking with my mustelids and I'm giving the honey badger a slight edge. I'm saying that it is also winning.

It's similar to the Wolverine. just really tough, hard-to-kill animal. I think the spider monkeys trying and trying and trying and getting really creative, but after a long battle, the Honey Badger is still going to win. Yeah, no, I like that one. And then we got a good, like, round two matchup of, like, two similar matches, I feel like. Wolverine versus Cheetah is kind of similar to Leopard versus Honey Badger. Okay.

Yeah. Spider-monkeys have long tails, right? Yeah. So maybe it could like tie its tail to the trigger of a gun. I do. No weapons in the cage. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm like, I'm like 52% Honey Badger, 48% Spider Monkey. I really think this one could go either. Yeah, because Spider Monkeys are really smart and they're super agile. Well, and I feel like with like the Hunger game landscape, they're going to be able to use like trees and sticks and stuff to their advantage a bit more, you know? Yeah. What movie is it? There's some Kung Fu like underground movie, like underground tournament where there's a guy that does like monkey kung fu. And it goes up against someone.

Kumete. Yeah, he goes up against just someone like huge. Yeah. I think that's this fight. You got like a brawler against someone that's super agile. Yeah, just like pick it. Even though they're the same size. Okay.

All right, Mike, we got a great matchup here for you. Let's go. Chimpanzee versus. Jeff. Okay. So even at the best of times... We know I could be, like, I weigh between 190 to 210. Do you want to just take this one, Jeff?

I weigh about 200. Because I feel like it's the only way anyone's going to give you a shot. Well, let me just make my argument. Go for her. Because you know how less than I feel. Yeah. Because I weigh about 200 pounds. I could take a chimpanzee right now.

They weigh like 130 most, you know? Sure. So he couldn't. So then like you boost their stats up to 200. That's a pretty good fight. So what do you think? It's not. So as I was saying, even at the best of times, it's, I mean, we're given the chimp a 99 out of 100 of these fights, I feel.

Yeah. But what's like, what are odds like Vegas odds? You're like negative what on this? No, he's like plus a million. plus 10,000. The chimp wins, yeah. Shit. All right, I tried.

All right, so I got... It's just going to wait for you to pee in the corner. Ooh, I got a tough one. Indian gray mongoose versus spotted hyena. Wes, what do you think is a better predator, a mongoose or a hyena? A mongoose. Really? Hyenas are mostly scavengers.

They got good jaws, though. Yeah, they got super strong jaws, but mongoose. Mungoos are really fast. Mongeese, right? Yeah. They're, I mean, for me it's the mongoose. Me too. Those things are like facing, squaring up with snakes and winning.

Cobra's rickety-tipati. Well, I think I'd take the hyena, but you guys both are going mongoose, so it's mongoose. It's like I outvoted both of mine so far. All right. No. West African porcupine versus an African elephant. The porcupine. Porcupine.

Because it's... Elephant, like, all it has for its weapons right now, like, it's the best if it's... Right. No weight. It's no... But it just uses its weight. So it's not going to be able to do it much.

All it has is its tusks. Maybe it's a little more agile with its tusks. I don't know. I'm not saying it's as clear cut. African-crested porcupines weigh, like, 22 to 66 pounds. So it's getting a big boost, too. Yeah. I don't think the porcupine isn't an aggressive animal, but the elephant isn't really either.

The elephant's attacking it over and over again, and it's succumbing to its multiple quill wounds. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm going porcupine. All right, Mike. Siberian tiger versus no way rat, just a rat. Norway, Norway, rat. Yeah, just a normal. Norway.

No way. Sorry, Norway rat. No way is this rat. winning. I'm saying, well, wait, what makes, what makes Norway rats special? Do we, is, that's just the common rat. That's like the rat you see in like, okay, so it's got the diseases. Yeah, it's like three pounds normally, so it's like 50 times bigger than what it normally would be. Siberian tiger. A small adult Siberian tiger's like 230 pounds or so. So like, if you grabbed one of them and just made it a touch smaller,

are you still getting a pretty normal tiger, you know? Yeah, I think it's coded in behavior is... The big ones get 700 pounds. I'm giving it to the tiger, just because I feel like it has a better strategy going into the fight than a rat would to take down something equally as large. Rat teeth would be huge, though. It's true.

They'd be all rabbit. The tiger kills prey that has really big teeth, too, or like tusks or whatever, and they know how to stay away from them. So I agree. I kind of want to change my spider monkey, can I? Is it too late? I think the spider monkey wins.

If you make a good enough argument. I think I was still thinking that the badger was built in a way where it wouldn't sustain the amount of damage. But if they're both 200 pounds, the spider monkey is going to have huge teeth. It's going to be really smart. I think it's chucking rocks at this badger. I think it's like, I think it's going to kill it over time. I think it can like. It's staying in the trees.

Do a lot of damage from like away from it. Above. Right. So I think the spider monkey wins. Let's change it. Yeah. Thank you. Unanimously bothering me.

No, I like that. All right. So we got a round one of land mammals set in stone now, Wes. All right. So you know it's real hard. You can make changes in stone, but it's really hard. Yeah. Yeah, it's true.

All right. So creepy crawling. were in stone and that's lasted. God did that. Well, didn't he break one of them because he got so pissed? Just because people were having fun. Yeah. That dude is such a buzzkill.

All right. Let's do creepy crawler round one. And then. Okay. Do you guys have a creepy crawler oven when you were kids or was you guys too young? I never had one. My friend did. Creepy crawlers.

Yeah, I had one. And you would just, for those of you don't know, it was like a, it was like a, The ovens that people sometimes buy for their kids, you could bake little things in. But instead of baking little treats, you would put this, like, disgusting gel into these molds and bake little, like, spiders and stuff. Yeah. And it just smelled, like, the worst chemicals. I love it. It was like a, yeah, I made a lot of gross little.

A top five jealous moment at Show and Tell for Mike in elementary school when my friend brought it in. I don't know if it was the most jealous I've ever been, but. It's in the top five ever. Got to be a Fysmur. In high school, one of my friends, there's a girl I always had a crush on who didn't like me at all. And then he found out I had a crush on her and just, like, dated her for two weeks. And I was pretty jealous of him. Yeah.

You bring her to show a dick. Yeah. Just show me like, hey, just so you know, I am better than you. I can do this. So don't forget. I never forgot. All right. So, Mike, you just picked.

So it's my pick now, right? What did I pick? Tiger versus Rat. Yeah. So creepy crawler, round one, we got Black Widow versus Brown Recluse Spider. The Brown Recluse is, they're both, I mean, all of these creepy crawlers are getting huge, right? Yeah. The Brown, this is.

Black Widow is getting a lot bigger. Or, like, I think it's size. Not really. I think it gets, well, yeah, I guess. year right they're like the same size they're about the same size yeah it's negligible i'm taking i'm taking the black widow because brown recluses don't use webs right that's a good question we haven't really gone into but see i was almost gonna say the other like brown recluses do run around a lot more like they're ground hunting spiders i don't know if they have any webs or not but i don't

think they use webs to ensnare prey yeah um black widows are to me web and up That almost felt like an advantage to me, though, that the brown recluse was like so much more mobile. But yeah, I don't know. I guess that's like comes down to your technique that you think is more effective. Oh, shit. They both have really potent venom. Are you going to side with Wes? I'm going with the Black Widow.

Okay. Okay. I think I wanted the Brown recluse to win because I think when it comes to fighting some of our other animals, it's much more interesting to think about a spider that moves on the ground than one. than one that sits in webs. You know what I mean, though? It just throws like such an interest, like the web thing is, it kind of defeats the purpose. It's like a, it's like a superpower almost.

Right. But yeah, that's fine. You don't think any animals can get through the web? If they're all 200 pounds. I think a two, spoiler here, I think a 200 pound spider beats everything on our list. But I would much rather be like a running spider than a webbed spider. but I'm, you know, I'm outvoted.

So we're keeping the black. Do you like conversation with the brown recluse going forward? Yeah. But also, I agree with that. I like that. Black widows can move on the ground, but they're not as fast. Brown recluses will just have like gigantic tunnels in the ground and be like creeping around all over.

I think it's a better contender. Let's do brown recluse. Good. All right. Wes, you got fire ant versus bullet ant. I'm picking the bullet ant. bigger jaws, stronger venom. I just think it's, I think it's a clear.

You think the jaws will still be bigger? Yeah, it still has bigger mandibles. Like if they're both upgraded to 200 pounds, like they're upgraded, their body's like proportions stay the same, right? So like the fire ant has smaller size jaws compared to the rest of its body than the bullet ant. Okay.

So I'm picking, I'm picking the bullet ant because it's got bigger mandibles. It can kill stronger venom. Can't actually like use fire, right? No. No, they don't have fire. I think bullet ants have... Maybe the name.

The names there are pretty crazy. Fire and bullet. Yeah. Bullet ants don't have bullet powers either. I'm just going to make sure I'm right about them having bulletins having good their jaws. Yeah, no, that's not what I know I'm right about that. Okay.

Yeah, I'm picking the bullet ant for sure. Okay. They have like pinchers too, right? And mouse can't. Can't they, don't they have like two? That's what I'm, their mandibles are like their pincers. Yeah. That's their, but that's their jaws.

And then they have a mouth that that feeds into. Yeah. All right, we got 200 pound Western Diamondback rattlesnake versus spitting cobra. Mike? Cobra versus Diamondback, huh? Speeding cobra. That makes so little difference to me, who knows next to nothing about any of these. A spitting cobra can literally spit its venom into the eyes of like an attacker.

Right. Okay. And they both weigh like, I don't know, five pounds or something. So now they're huge. They're just huge now. I'll go with this. Having a projectile attack is going to put it over the edge for me every time if one has a projectile and the other doesn't. So I'm going with the spitting cobra.

Yeah. In this matchup, I feel like the diamond back has like the faster strike and a better like strike still. but the spitting cobra does spit a ton of venom now. Yeah. I don't know how much like venom from other species of snakes affect like other species. Like if a cobra venom would like really do much to a rattlesnake. But I think it would. I think they're pretty much immune to their own venom.

But I think a cobra venom would affect it and vice versa. So I like that pick. Especially to an eyeball. I think if you get it in an eyeball no matter whose it is, it's going to hurt. Plus, the spitting cobra introduces a fun element into this whole thing. Plus, how is a snake going to wipe venom out of their eyeballs? They don't have hands. It's a good point.

They have to use their tail, but their tails are rattles. Yeah. That's not going to be comfortable. No, it's going to be noisy. Okay. Yeah. All right, so I got green andaconda versus eastern coral snake. Coral snakes are like super venomous, right?

And they're tiny little guys? Yeah, they're small. They're rear fanged. So they really have to bite down to get their venom in. They're not like a striking snake where they have like the hypodermic needle injection. They have to like kind of work their venom in. But they do have, they have a really potent neurotoxin. How fast does it work to kill something?

Pretty fast. I mean, it's it's neurotoxin. So it attacks the nervous system. It's like a. So I'm saying the green anaconda starts off like waning and starts like strangling this coral snake. Yeah. But then the coral snake eventually gets a bite in and kills the anaconda. Yeah, I like that.

I think two equally sized snakes, it's pretty hard for one of them to constrict the other one to death. I think that it would be pretty tricky for the anaconda to win. I think it would be super easy. Since snakes are just basically one long neck, you can just strangle the whole thing, you know, kill it pretty easily. You know what? Where does the neck end and the tail begin? I think this is like one of the most obvious ones. I was just thinking for the next matchup.

Just playing devil's advocate. All right. Well, for actually the easiest matchup, Wes, we got next Komodo Dragon versus the those. really cool looking axolotles. Oh, the cuties, the little pink cuties? The ones that look like they just disintegrate if you touched it. I just put them in because we haven't really ever talked about them and I wanted the picture, you know. You're right.

This is the easiest matchup. It's definitely the Komodo dragon. Axolotles have like no protection or weapons whatsoever. Except for their cuteness, they can do a little. They are very cute, disarmingly cute. Right. Yeah. I don't think the Komodo dragon gives a shit.

Oh, those rascals. You got a gecko versus scorpion. Oh, I put in the type of gecko. Did you not want to use it? No. Tokeg? What's a tokega gecko? They're kind of like known as being the meanest species of gecko.

There's lots of geckos. Okay. But, yeah, they can regrow their tails, which is something. Or a bark scorpion. So maybe the move would be they rip their own tail off and use it as like a throwing weapon. tail. Yeah. And then the scorpion gets its tail, like, stuck in the gecko's lost tail.

Yeah. It's like a little diversionary. I don't think they're smart enough for that. Are we giving them, like, 200. Their brain is bigger now, too, West. 200-pound bark scorpion is pretty sweet, though. Yeah, I think. I'm giving it to the scorpion.

Yeah, I like that. Those bark scorpions have some of the most potent venom of scorpions. Nice. So, yeah, I like that would be a good round two matchup. The Komodo versus the bark scorpion. You got to think about it too. With all these venomous animals, like a tiny little bark scorpion that's the size of your pinky finger can put a person in the hospital with just like drops of venom that we probably couldn't even see.

So when it's 200 pounds, it's pumping liters of that same venom into something. Right. Like probably enough to kill multiple blue whales. like that's how much venom we're talking. So all it has to do is get any of these venomous animals. All they have to do is get their venom in and that thing's toast. Well, especially if the blue whales weigh 200 pounds. Right.

Yeah. I'm talking normal blue whales. All right. We only got two left people. So Hercules beetle versus dung beetle to me. I've seen a video of Hercules Beatles just like yeet in other Beatles office. stuff with their horns just flinging them which is sweet that's such a good move right but man this dung beetle is going to have such a big ball of dung just roll the beetle with like a because they roll

their dungs are bigger than them and they're 200 pounds now so it's rolling like a 400 pound thing of dung over this hercules beetle like could probably use the like the stars to find the hercules beetle So I'm taking the dung beetle With this big old ball of dung I'm voting for the Hercules beetle But I don't Actually you know what if they're both the exact same size Yeah who knows

You know I know you love dung beetles So let's leave the dung beetle I love both of them They're both cool I like that ball of dung beetle It's funny because I kind of liked getting vetoed Just because I like both animals And I feel bad like for the one that I chose

Losing one Yeah Yeah I didn't care at all that I got rid of the axolato. No. See ya. All right, Mike. This is a good one.

200 pound praying mantis versus a 200 pound giant centipede. Oh, wait. This is to West though, but it is a good one, Mike. Okay. Yeah, you're right. I mean, I got to go with the centipede again because it's venomous. And so I think all it takes is like a bite and the praying mantis is done. I like that I think the praying mantis is done.

I think the praying mantis is like a more fun contender because of the way that it kills stuff. But I think if they're equally sized, praying mantis usually kill stuff that's smaller than them. And if this thing's just as big and it's venomous, I'm picking the centipede. I'm going to veto. I think the praying mantis decapitates the centipede before it dies of any venom. I was going to say it's coming down to Mike. So what happens is the mantis seduces the centipede. So they have sex.

And you know what happens after sex, Wes, with mantises? Yeah. Vito, are you with me, Mike? Oh, yeah, totally. This one's got a mantis. That's fine. I actually, I'd rather have the mantis in because we already have a lot of venomous critters in there. You know a mantis is like really easily getting seduced by, or a centipede is getting seduced by a mantis.

Because praying mantises are just a lot prettier than centipedes. It's like, this is my chance. I'm just going to, I'm just going to. make this clear too, like, it's hunger game rules. So, like, there is venom that they can use, but if the other animal, like, gets hit with venom that's going to kill them, but still kills the other animal first, then the hunger game rule people, like, save that. They come in, save. Yeah. So it's not going to, it's not going to die anymore. Yeah. Didn't pee to eat the danger berries or whatever? Before the venom gets, yeah, exactly. What were they called? I just want

some kind of berry. Oh, yeah, I don't remember. Gooseberries. I do want to like, I do want to stress again, any 200-pound venomous animal like this is pumping so much venom into you that probably just the extra liquid in your body would kill you instantly. So it's an instant death for any of these venomous critters once they get that venom in you. Yeah, well, that's just your opinion. Yeah, I think decapitation is pretty instant. Yeah, I'm fine with the praying mantis, but I'm saying I don't think. any of our animals are getting bit and then dying a slow death from venom. If you get bit by the venom, you're dying.

Okay. So that's our teaser. I hope that was entertaining. We're going to get more into it. Mike, you said you have like a real sleeper pick that you want to go a long ways. It's going the distance. I'm fighting tooth and nail for it. All right.

That's our podcast. Yep, tooth and nail. That's that Christian punk record label. Yeah, what, jars of clay? or something. I don't know. It was on that label. PX. Yeah. Wes, what else do we want to do before end in this episode?

You know what? I think we should just end it. I think let's do our claw ratings because we didn't do those for leopards. We got a fresh new batch of listener questions that we're going to get to in our next episodes. So we're excited to get to those. We got a bunch of patron questions to get to. But I think let's just go ahead and do our claw ratings and wrap this baby up. So I mentioned this briefly. I kind of spoiled this in the last episode. This was my favorite animal for a long time, leopards.

I think they're beautiful. I think they're one of the more like a luring of the cats. I think just the way how stealthy they are, how beautiful they are. No big surprise here. It's a 10-claw animal for me. What? No. 10?

10 claws. This is one I think is really hard. for me because there's just so many cool big cats and I feel like it's kind of lame to just have them all ranked like the same you know yeah so I'm giving them all tens I'm giving it a nine I think that your story made me like them a lot more just like I kind of feel like maybe I should like them more than jaguars because like I don't know I think they pose in cooler spots and trees yeah they can kill way more people They seem just a little more badass than a jaguar.

I don't know, though. It's on my radar. Yeah, okay. It's on my radar. But jaguars are still, I still like jaguars, cheetahs, lions, tigers more than leopard. So that's why I have to give it a nine. Okay. But overall, let's put them at 57, hoping I see some in Africa and that number goes way up.

All right. I'll also give them a nine. I don't have anything new to add to the conversation. that hasn't been covered already. I just think they're an extremely charismatic and pretty animal. And people should... Where do you have them ranked for cats? So it's tiger.

Wild cats. Tiger, cheetah, jag, leopard. Okay. So fourth. Right now, in my current rankings, I think they'd probably be fourth for me, too. I think I'd go tiger. No, sorry, Jaguar Mountain Lion, Tiger, Leopard. Wouldn't probably be it. Oh, okay.

But I like them all a lot. They're all ten claws for me. I do have one listener question actually. Okay. Mine and Jeff's mom, Cindy, who a lot of you have heard on this podcast, Hey mom. Had a question that she really wanted me to ask. Okay.

And it was if all three of us were in one of these rooms that we talked about in our stories and a leopard came in, who would get killed first? And why? I would say not me because I'm the worst sleeper. So I don't think I would be asleep yet. There was one story. the cook, when the leopard went in and like almost got the cook, but the tree cracked and it got away, the cook was snoring really loud. And that's why Corbett thought that it had targeted him.

Yeah. So I will say like either of you are a bigger target for that. You snore too. Not nearly as much as you guys do. I'm like once every few days. Not as much, but you do. You are, I have the most to be eaten if it chooses me, which is tem. But you're the easiest to carry out of the room.

That's true. I would be very easy. And it does seem like it kind of went for like smaller people usually. Yeah. Yeah. It might be me. I'll go west. I think if we're laying on our backs, it's one of you two.

If we're not, then it's me. If we're snoring, cutting logs. Uh-huh. Maybe if I have a bloody nose and it smells the blood. Ooh. Or if you're up peeing in the corner. I do pee a lot in the night. does wait for people to do that. Maybe it is me.

I think any of us are pretty good victims. So bring it on leopards. All right. Thanks, everyone for sticking with us through the story. I really liked it. It's one of those ones that the more I researched it, the more I could only think about it. Like all I've been thinking about for the last few weeks is this story. So it's kind of bittersweet to be done with it. But we are going to be talking more Corbett at some point in this podcast. Oh, nice.

So, great. When we get to the Chompawat Tiger or maybe some of his other exploits. It chomped a lot of people. Save that for that awesome. Let's end it right there. Love you guys. Bye guys. Love you.

See ya.