Why Tigers Never Attack Men Unless They Are Provoked

About the title: this is a folktale promise, not a rule about wildlife. Never assume a tiger, leopard or other wild animal is safe to approach because it has not been provoked.

A hunter in the forest came face to face with a tiger one day. To begin with, both were frightened, but they talked, and the talk turned into friendship. They made a plan to share each other’s lives for a while: first the man would spend a fortnight in the tiger’s den in the forest, and afterward the tiger would come and stay at the man’s.

The tiger proved such a fine host that the man thought nobody had ever looked after him so well. When the visit ended, it was the tiger’s turn to travel to the man’s home, and along the way he grew uneasy. Would he truly be safe there, he wanted to know. “Suppose your friends take one look at me and decide to kill me?”

“Don’t be afraid,” the man said. “Nobody will lay a hand on you as long as I am with you.”

So the tiger went home with him and stayed three weeks. He had brought along his young son, a male cub, and the cub and the man’s boy became close companions.

A few months later, the man lost his father. As soon as Tiger heard the sad news, he and the cub hurried off to sit with his friend in his grief, and they took a large gift of money to help him.

On Tiger’s way back to the forest, two of the man’s friends hid by the path and fired at him. Luckily the shot did not kill him, but a painful worry took hold of him: perhaps his friend had wanted it done. He resolved to learn the truth.

He went back to the very spot in the forest where the two of them had first met, and lay down as still as a dead animal, first telling the cub to keep watch and see what happened.

By and by the man came that way. Seeing his friend stretched out lifeless, as he believed, he was overcome with sorrow. He wept and mourned beside the body, and the whole night through he stayed there with the cub, guarding Tiger so that nothing could harm him.

At daybreak Tiger was certain his friend had known nothing about the shooting, and his heart filled with gladness. He rose to his feet, to the man’s utter amazement, and told him why he had played dead.

“Go home,” Tiger said, “and keep me always in your thoughts. From now on, for your sake, I will not touch any man unless he meddles with me first.”

About this story

This is story XXXIII in Barker and Sinclair’s West African Folk-Tales (1917). In a note elsewhere in the book, Barker explains that the “tiger” of West African stories is really a leopard, so the friend in this tale is a leopard under an English name.

The tale leaves the shooters’ motives unexplained. The two men who fire the shot are never named, and the story is less interested in them than in the tiger’s test of his friend’s loyalty and the promise that follows.

Read the original: West African Folk-Tales on Gutenberg (Barker and Sinclair, 1917)

Reading guidance: older children with discussion. The animal is shot at, pretends to be dead and is mourned; its final reassuring promise applies to the fictional character only.

Testing a friendship without blaming a whole group

The hidden shot could make Tiger blame his human friend for other people’s actions. Instead he seeks evidence about this particular man. The night-long vigil answers his fear through sustained care rather than a quick denial. The cub witnesses both the staged death and the friend’s response, connecting the adults’ relationship to the next generation.

List what Tiger knows after the attack and what he still does not know. Then write the direct question he might have asked instead of pretending to be dead. What would an answer reveal, and what does the vigil reveal that words might not?

Questions to ask

• How did the man and the tiger become friends?
• Why did the tiger pretend to be dead?
• What promise did the tiger make at the end, and why?

You may also like

• Ohia and the Thieving Deer — a “King Tiger” who is really a leopard
• The Ungrateful Man — a story about loyalty tested