The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (Vintage Departures)

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Part natural history, part Russian history and part thriller; it tells a gripping and gory story of what it's like to stalk - and be stalked by - the largest species of cat still walking the Earth. One of THE first picture books that I ever read as a child. It was one of the books that inspired me to become an illustrator! Lizzie Stewart has written (and drawn!) such a wonderful story - I can't really say any more than that! It brings out the importance of imagination and seeking for things, and the magic that all creates. Plus Jeff is really cool, too! I can't imagine any of the sessions he describes are actually that helpful. I would love to see the long term outcomes of all his patients. This is an altogether different kind of manhunt story . . . . The pursuit culminates in a breathtaking stand-off of man versus cat in a forest clearing - a denouement every bit as explosive and surprising as the raid in Abbottabad earlier this week.

People and tigers don't coexist well. Especially in a place like Russia's "Wild East." But their population has modestly rebounded since Vaillant's book was written, due to intensive conservation efforts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia... But a tiger is a very big animal, with a simply enormous appetite. Although he sits very nicely at the kitchen table, and waits politely to be offered the sandwiches, the cakes, the buns and then the biscuits, each time he scoffs the lot! And when he is offered a cup of tea, he not only drinks it all, but also all the milk in the milk jug. Then he looks round to see what else he can find. To paraphrase Dostoevski in Notes from the Underground; no one can live without being able to explain to themselves what is happening to them, and if one day they should no longer be able to explain anything to themselves, they would say they had gone mad, and this would be for them the last explanation left. Second bit of true infromation. Tigers are missing what is the tiger version of the collarbone. This allows them to jump really far. An Indian tiger can gain the height of a Asian Elephant quite easily. An unbelievable tale, expertly told, with a few paragraphs that I would give my eye teeth to have written.

A tiger goes man-eater and terrorizes a remote Siberian village. Can Yuri Trush and his men end the tiger's bloody reign of terror or join its long list of victims? Judith Kerr has written many super books and whilst The Tiger Who Came to Tea is my favourite, Mog the forgetful catmust be a close second. Judith’s humour and warmth shines through in all of her books and it is easy to see just how she became such an influential figure in children’s books! Along with what drives much of the illegal trade in tiger-based supplements. The brandname Viagra is derived from vyaaghra, the Sanskrit word for tiger. Hormones control our thinking. Ivan Dunkai’s son Vasily, a lifelong hunter who has shared his territory with tigers all his life, has come to a similar conclusion. On a bitterly cold day in March 2007, he tried to put the tiger into a context an outsider could understand. “A hunter can only rely on himself,” he said. “If anything happens, there is no one to help him, and all of us who live this way have a very advanced intuition. We also carry the experience of our ancestors in our heads: that’s how a man functions in taiga. The tiger is a hunter, just the same as a man is a hunter. A hunter has to think about how to get his prey. It is different for boar and deer: if leaves or cones fall down from a tree, that’s what they eat; there is no need to think. Tigers think.” The community aspect reminded of stories of the Bataan Death March and the forced use of prisoners to build roads and facilities in WWII. Trauma in the extreme example, the weak were bayoneted by the road, no health care was provided, and there was very little food. A common trait of the survivors: a caring somebody to watch over them and to whom they cared when time arose. A human connection to life where everything else was inhuman in nature. Taking care of others can help form trust and mutual care. (Unless the other is a narcissist, or is the reason for the trauma, etc...)

By regularly bringing down large prey like elk, moose, boar, and deer, the tiger feeds countless smaller animals, birds, and insects, not to mention the soil. Every such event sends another pulse of lifeblood through the body of the forest." Louie on the magic of shared reading: 'You just see the positive outcome. Your connection to your child is so different'Hunting for prime specimens of a species can also morphologically, at a minimum, affect a species in reducing the gene pool. An example is the anthropogenic selection the moose of eastern North America went through. Sport hunters wanting bull moose with the largest antlers, such were systematically removed from the gene pool while the smaller-antlered bulls were left to pass on their more modest genes, year after year.