User:Raghavan2010/Muktesar Man-Eater

The Muktesar Man-Eater was a young Bengal Tigress which killed 18 people belonging to Muktesar Village in Kumaon before being shot by Jim Corbett in 1910.According to Corbett the tigress was blind in one eye and had some fifty porcupine quills embedded in her right foreleg.

Cause of Maneating
According to Corbett this tigress was a subadult which had taken up residence at the outskirts of Muktesar thriving on the wild game.One day in an encounter with a porcupine she lost an eye and got some fifty quills embedded in her right foreleg.Several of these quills after hitting a bone had rebounded in the form of a "U",the point and the broken off end being close together.Sores formed where she attempted to extract the quills.As she was licking her wounds in the grass a woman, who had gone to cut grass for her cattle eventually reached her.The unfortunate woman got hit on the head by the tigress and her skull broke.The tigress left her without eating any part of her and hid under a hollow tree nearby.Two days later a man came to chop firewood from this tree and was killed.He was half eaten.As a result the tigress developed a taste for human flesh by accident.The following day she killed her third victim without any provocation.In Man-Eaters of Kumaon Corbett says,"The wound that has caused a particular tiger to take to man-eating might be the result of a carelessly fired shot and failure to follow up and recover the wounded animal, or be the result of the tiger having lost his temper while killing a porcupine".

Hunt for the Tigress
When the toll of the humans killed by the tigress had risen to 18 the district officials of Kumaon persuaded Jim Corbett who had then killed the Champawat Tiger and was in pursuit of the Panar Leopard to shoot the maneater.