PLN 29

The article "A Large Hearted Gentlemen" by Jason Bellows talks about Jim Corbett and his uncanny knack to track large cats in the Indonesian jungle and not to kill them but to track and document them in their natural habitat. The only time Corbett would shoot an animal was when everyone was screaming about the man eating tigers and panthers. He would kill them and learn that they were hunting humans because they were either old or had injuries so they couldn’t hunt regular game. One of the man eaters that Corbett killed was a panther in the Indonesian jungle. He found one of the animals favorite trails and set a goat in the trail, hid in a mango tree and waited for the animal to come. On the 11th day that Corbett was in the tree the animal came, Corbett turned on his light and shot the animal. When he got out of the tree to examine the animal he saw that it had porcupine wounds in its leg that had been there for many years. As most little spikes like that dissolve, porcupine needles don’t, so when the needles go in they don’t come out without some one doing something about it. With the porcupine needles in the cat’s leg, the muscles started to rot and the bone was wearing thin, that’s why the cat hunted humans instead of regular game. I think the lesson from this story is that you shouldn’t make false presumptions when you don’t know the real answer or don’t judge a book by it’s cover.