lisamorgendunst2{at}hotmail.com (RattleRain) wrote in
news:btq4u9$170e$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> cpw{at}rahul.net (C. P. Weidling) wrote in message
> news:... 
>> William Morse  writes:
>> 
>> > lisamorgendunst{at}yahoo.com (Lisa Morgendunst) wrote in
>> > news:btca2u$5sa$1 {at}darwin.ediacara.org:
>> > 
>> > > I was reading a book about big cats. It says a Siberian tiger can
>> > > easily kill and devour a brown bear twice its size. All this
>> > > time, I thought the brown bear(aka Grizzly in North America)was
>> > > the baddest land carnivore.

>>    ......
>> I also have a hard time imagining a scenario where the two animals
>> would duke it out.  There used to be 'bear baiting' in England and
>> stuff like that but...
 
>> Anyway, for what it's worth when speaking of the "baddest" land
>> carnivore, I remember watching a documentary about wild dogs in
>> India, and the researchers came across the remains of a tiger that a
>> pack of dogs had killed and eaten, though some of the dogs had been
>> killed by the tiger. It seems to me they must have been desperately
>> hungry to do it.  Of course, one dog wouldn't have had a chance, so I
>> don't know if this counts, but it is an example of something that
>> actually happened in the wild, not something contrived.
 
> Those dogs are called dholes and attack tigers only when very hungry.
> They usually lose half the pack before the tiger is killed.
 

This raises the question of whether you can count groups in speaking of 
the "baddest" carnivores, in which case army ants might be
"top dog", so 
to speak - but I digress :-)

If the dholes lose half (or even a substantial fraction) of the pack in 
such an attack, you have to ask how they can afford it, even when very 
hungry? This was what bothered me in the tiger eating bear scenario, 
since the risk to the tiger must still be very high. (By the way, while 
tiger/bear fights have been artifically arranged, this was not what I was 
referring to above. One of the sites that noted bears as prey of tigers 
was reporting on an existing Russian research program that was 
documenting the feeding habits of Siberian tigers, and the list of prey 
did in fact include brown bears). Since any signficant risk, repeated 
over a significant number of encounters, would yield a very short life 
span for the predator, I have to wonder whether these encounters don't 
represent what is actually aberrant behavior in the face of habitat 
destruction.

Yours,

Bill Morse
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