The Tiger

I was like a person living with a baby tiger who had bitten my foot when hungry, and my response was to try to placate it by throwing it chunks of steak. That worked fine in the short term, but every day that went by, the tiger got bigger and stronger and needed more meat to be satisfied.

Many years ago I became fascinated by a rooster named Weirdo, who weighed over thirty pounds. His offspring, Ralph, was even bigger. The man who had raised these extremely aggressive animals had been forced to singe off their spurs with a blowtorch. Then I found Frank, a miniature horse, specially bred from sixteenth-century Spanish stock, who stoo

He always included plenty of facts and figures about wolves in his talks, but he found that stories about individual wolves were what moved people.

“There are two categories of people when it comes to extreme situations,” said the leopard specialist Vasily Solkin. “One gets scared first and then starts thinking; the other starts thinking first and gets scared after the fact. Only the latter survive in the taiga.”

knew they could easily rip a moose or caribou apart, yet I didn’t feel intimidated because they seemed tranquil and not at all antagonistic. Four of them relaxed on the ground, and the other two

One day they ran into a group of white-lipped peccaries, the deadly, sharp-tusked wild pigs that roam the rain forest in packs. “Jaguars and pumas are afraid of them because they attack,” John said. “When they sense an outsider, they form a group. They make the most awful scraping sound with their tusks as a warning, and you can smell them. They gi