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Comment by jungletime | Hacker News Reader

In India, Tigers attack and eat people on a regular basis. Villagers wear specially made face masks on the back of the head to confuse and dissuade attacks from the back.

There is evidence that prehistoric cats preyed on humans enough to have evolved specialized incisor teeth for crushing human sculls.

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I’m assuming they’re a protected species or firearms of sufficient caliber are not prevalent in these villages?

They are:

* A protected endangered species

* Hard to track

* Better to not encounter than to fight

It's sort of like grizzlies in Northern America National Parks. Your ideal situation is you aren't encountering a half-ton apex predator so if you dissuade the encounter and you also avoid it, it's much better than attempting to perform Pavlovian training.

Attacks "on a regular basis" means a few dozen times per year in a country with hundreds of millions of people. Like pretty much all big predator attacks, the risk is really, really small; it's just so viscerally frightening that people get worked up about them.

I live in the US and hear far more concern about mountain lions than deer, even though people here are hundreds of times more likely to be killed by a deer. And do you know what helps control deer overpopulation? A healthy predator population.

High caliber firearms could be cost prohibitive, or simply illegal in that jurisdiction. Alternatively, firearms are only as useful as you are aware and capable of reacting...

Tigers tend to ambush their prey. You don't know you're under attack until its teeth are severing your jugular.

A handgun won't be of much use if you're jumped on from behind by a beast 3 times your weight and many times your strength.

If pouncing on villagers routinely resulted in catching a 12ga slug (buddy system when doing high risk things will do a pretty good job of guaranteeing that) then the tigers that live long enough to pass on their genes would be the ones that don't make a habit of pouncing on villagers.

It only takes a few generations for animals to become afraid of or lose their fear of humans. You see this in all sorts of species when hunting pressure is applied/removed.

I suspect you’d find that a single untrained human, even well-armed, isn’t always sufficient to kill a tiger.

So rather than avenge your buddy and improve the tiger gene pool, you’d get killed too.

For grizzly bear attacks, bear mace is more effective than guns. https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/spray-more-effective-than...

You don't have to get them every time just often enough that they stop doing it It's about making it statically much riskier for the tigers to misbehave, not saving everyone.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attack the majority who attack humans are infirm and desperate. Doubt taking them out of the gene pool would do any long-term good.

To get any firearm in India, you need to prove immediate danger from other humans, plus average basic daily income is $2 or something, so firearms are basically for rich people with enough connections.

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