Tiger Verses Wolf

There has been a lot of discussion about my most recent page on Ghost of the Gulag .

The big Question is: Would a tiger hunt and kill a wolf?

I do a lot of research and try to ground my fantasy with reality.  At the core this comic is about the conflicts that animals have with one another woven into historical human conflicts.  One of the books that first inspired my comic is The Tiger a true story of Vengeance and Survial by John Vaillant.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the book supporting tiger/wolf predation:

“ For all these reasons, there is no creature in the taiga that is off limits to the tiger; it alone can mete out death at will. Amur tigers have been known to eat everything from salmon and ducks to adult brown bears. There are few wolves in Primorye, not because the environment doesn’t suit them, but because the tigers eat them, too. The Amur tiger it could be said, takes a stalinist approach to competition.”

“Dogs seem to trigger the tiger’s wolf-killing instincts, and they also seem to relish the taste. Many is the Far Eastern hunter, farmer, or dacha owner who has risen in the morning to find nothing but a broken chain where his dog had been. When one former dog owner asked what these attacks sound like, he answered acidly, “ It’s more of a silence.”

Here is a short but fascinating article about the complicated relationship between wolf and tiger by Jonathan Slaght Ph.D. (Is the Russia and Northeast Asia Coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society.)

Unfriendly Neighbors

https://blog.wcs.org/photo/2015/11/04/unfriendly-neighbors-amur-tigers-wolves-russia/

Going beyond the book I’ve read several scientific studies of tiger predation. And it’s true that they hunt bear, even enormous brown bears!  This following excerpt directly inspired the comic where the mother is hunting asiatic brown browns that are nestled in their den.  

“In 2 cases tigers attempted to prey on denned bears, once successfully and once unsuccessfully. A radiocollared adult male tiger killed and ate a radiocollared adult male Asiatic black bear on 5 December 1998. The bear's movements had been localized for 14 days, suggesting it had denned, but we were unable to locate a den site because light snow had covered most of the tiger and bear tracks. Blood and claw marks indicated that the tiger climbed and extracted the bear from 2 different trees, one of which was a cottonwood large enough to contain a bear den.”

You can read the full scientific paper here https://www.bearbiology.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Seryodkin_14_2.pdf

This article blew my mind! Amur tigers were hunting hibernating bears!!!! I worked out an entire version where the mother actually hunted and killed the bear. Ultimately I backed off the idea. When you start drawing Asiatic black bears you realize they’re probably the cutest animals in all the Taiga. I want the Shadow the Walker’s mother to be inspirational and killing the bear went too far for me so I re-wrote and re-drew the whole section.

Deleted Scene

For a while I was planning on having the tigress kill the bear

Dog Experiment

For a little while I experimented with the tigress hunting a dog.

I then started experimenting with the tiger’s mother eating a hunter’s dog- I even drew it out too. Ultimately I came to the same conclusion as I did with Asiatic Black Bear. Which brought the wolves back into the story, they are inherently in conflict with one another and it would be powerful to give the tiger real motivation for hating wolves.

The relationship that tigers have with wolves in my comic is directly inspired by the way wolves and tigers interact in the wild. Yes I do take wild liberties, they speak, the tiger is blind but at the core I hope the research I do helps ground these animal characters in a more believable and entertaining way.