Suspected poacher eaten by lions in South Africa

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

61. The lions might have had something more than just lunch in mind.

I read this fascinating book - The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, about a tiger who had once been shot and injured by a poacher, and had started stalking specific people - especially the man who had shot him. It appeared that the tiger's intent wasn't hunting for food, but for revenge. Maybe the lions were doing the same thing. Cats are very smart and not to be trifled with.

In 1997, deep in the remote Russian backcountry, a gigantic Amur tiger begins acting like the only thing more savage than a wild animal--us. It doesn’t just attack villagers; it hunts them, picking its targets like a hitman with a contract, at one point even dragging a mattress out of a shack so it can lie comfortably in wait until the woodsman returns home. A few days later, the woodsman’s horrified friends discover remains “so small and so few they could have fit in a shirt pocket.”

Vaillant is as masterful with science as he is with suspense. We feel what it’s like to be in a tiny settlement cut off from the rest of the world, at the mercy of a beast so swift that it can’t be seen until its mouth bites down on your face. Tigers, Vaillant explains, are nature’s last word in mammalian weapons design. Big as three NFL linebackers bundled into one, armed with claws longer than fingers and jaws rated on a strength-scale used for dinosaurs, tigers are built like missiles and can out-swim, out-climb, out-fox and out-run just about anything that breathes. That’s the bad news; the worse news is, they’re also armed with memory and invisibility.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003F3PKY0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1