tiger needs to make in order to subdue a human being. A tiger’s jaws can
exert roughly a thousand pounds of pressure per square inch, but it takes
less than a hundred pounds to crush a windpipe, and only five pounds to
block the carotid artery, which causes unconsciousness almost instantly.
In other words, a tiger’s fangs don’t need to puncture the skin in order to
immobilize prey; no blood need be let.
Although a tiger’s canines may be nearly an inch thick at the base, they
still break surprisingly often, and they don’t grow back; these losses can
be crippling and are one reason wild tigers may turn to livestock killing
and man-eating. As menacing as they appear, tiger fangs are actually
delicate instruments—literally, bundles of nerves and blood vessels
encased in layers of bonelike dentin, sheathed in enamel and somewhat
rounded at the ends. With these four surgical sensors, the tiger has the
ability to feel its way through prey, differentiating between bone and
tissue types to find the gap between two vertebrae in order to sever the
spinal cord, or locate the windpipe in order to stifle the air supply—all at
attack speed. In this sense, the canines are sentient weapons, capable of
grasping and puncturing but also of deciphering the Braille of an animal’s
anatomy. As removed as we are from our own origins in the wild, our
teeth possess the same sensitivity, and we rely on it daily whether we are
gnawing a T-bone, love-biting a nipple, or detecting rot in an apple by
resistance alone.
It was not clear if the tiger simply took Pochepnya in his jaws and
carried him off or clubbed him first. The force of a tiger paw strike has
never been measured, but given that a tiger weighs two or three times as
much as a prizefighter, and is many times stronger with even faster
reflexes, one can begin to calculate how devastating a single blow from a
tiger’s paw might be. Bengal tigers have been observed breaking the
necks and skulls of buffalo with paw strikes. Reginald Burton, a British
hunter, author, and longtime India hand, observed a tiger clubbing a
beater (hunting assistant) so hard that its claws penetrated the heavy brass
dish suspended from the man’s back.
In the winter of 1960, coincidentally on the Amba River, a ranger and
naturalist named Vladimir Troinin witnessed an epic battle between a
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