Speaker 1: Not too long ago, we started publishing a new column on newyorker.com called Afterword. It's written by the great Susan Orlean. Afterword is an obituary column of sorts. Instead of focusing on the lives of the highly newsworthy, Susan writes about people and animals and even things that never made it to the front page. As we near the end of the year, we'll be taking note of some of those lives here at the New Yorker Radio Hour. Here's Susan Orlean reading from her piece, The Ultimate Tiger Mom.
Susan Orlean: Unlike most tiger mothers, Collarwali was, in fact, a tiger.
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Susan Orlean: Her life was characterized by unusualness. She was unusually large for a female, so big, observers often mistook her for a male and other tigers were scared to fight with her. She was unusually friendly. Tigers are solitary and shy, but Collarwali seemed relaxed about venturing near people and was often spotted afoot in the Pench Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh in India where she lived. Most notably, she was unusually fertile. She gave birth to 29 cubs in her lifetime, which accounts for almost 1% of all the tigers in India. She was also unusually well known. Her mother, Badi Mata, was the subject of the popular BBC documentary, Tiger: Spy in the Jungle, from 2008.
David Attenborough: Tigers are generally said to succeed just one time out of 10, but this tiger kills on average every third try.
Susan Orlean: With narration by David Attenborough, the documentary followed the life of Badi Mata and her litter of four cubs, one of which was Collarwali.
David Attenborough: [unintelligible 00:02:03] this size, each cub consumes around two kilos of meat at a single sitting.
Susan Orlean: After this celebrated start, Collarwali lived an unusually long time. The average tiger lifespan is 15 years, which she bettered by almost two. When she died in January, she lay in state on a flower-strewn pyre, and her funeral was attended by a crowd, including Madhya Pradesh's forest minister and a number of other government officials. Mourning was widespread.
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Susan Orlean: Collarwali was formally known less poetically as T15. In 2008, she was the first tigress in Pench to be fitted with a radio collar hence her nickname, Collarwali, which means collar wearer in Hindi. That same year, Collarwali gave birth to her first litter, but she fumbled as a new mother, and all her cubs died of pneumonia. In time though, she developed serious motherhood skills and her next litters flourished. In 2010, she gave birth to a mega litter of five cubs.
Tiger litters are usually three or four in size, and half of all cubs born die in the first years of their lives. To rear a whopping five cubs is world-class. Collarwali was a tough-love kind of mother, letting her cubs start hunting earlier than a more helicopter parenting tigress. Her methodology was so successful that her cubs, not only overachieved, they even stayed in touch with her after they moved away, which is said to be rare in the tiger world. Tigers are India's national animal.
In 1973, a conservation effort called Project Tiger was launched to try to stabilize their declining population. Tigers with wanderlust that leave conservation areas are sometimes killed by farmers, and farmers are sometimes killed by tigers. The market for tiger parts, which are believed to have health benefits, including as aphrodisiacs, continues to flourish. Nevertheless, conservation efforts, coupled with Collarwali's fecundity, have made a difference, and India's tiger population is slowly rising.
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Susan Orlean: At Collarwali's funeral, following her death from natural causes, social distancing was observed, but the occasion was equally stirring. The enormous tigress was covered with yellow, orange, and white carnations, and she was shrouded in white except for her magnificent head. A line of mourners approached the wooden pyre, one by one, and offered her flowers before she was cremated.
Collarwali's remarkable fruitfulness did raise the risk of her cubs in breeding, but on balance, her mothering was a net positive, and her loss a tragedy. After the funeral, the chief minister of the state wrote on Twitter, "The forest of Madhya Pradesh will always resonate with the roar of the cubs of the queen of Pench Tiger Reserve."
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Speaker 1: Susan Orlean reading from the Ultimate Tiger Mom from April of this year. You can read Susan's column, Afterword, at newyorker.com.
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