I was at a parent/teacher conference t’other day. I noticed one of the kids had a book on his desk. The book was entitled, “African Folk Tales.” It had a picture of a happy little kid surrounded by all manner of African animals: The proper sort of elephant, hyenas, Anansi was there, some zebras…and a tiger. And I became mildy annoyed that there would be a tiger on the cover of a book expressly concerning itself with Africa. My first thought was, “Why is there a tiger on the cover of this book when tigers are not an African animal?” Then I wondered, “Gee, do tigers maybe appear in some African tales–maybe as a representation of a lost traveller?”
And then my mind settled on, "Why the hell didn’t tigers ever make it into Africa? There were lions in Yurp and Asia–what kept the tigers out of Africa? Was it an early form of feline Apartheid? Was it blatant specism? Irreconcilable religious differences? What? And don’t tell me it was a food problem because people abound in Africa and tigers don’t mind eating people.
Going by this, they perhaps never got anywhere near Africa? The automatic assumption ‘big cat = Africa’ is understandable, given the ignorance presented to children (cf the OP), but nonetheless wrong. Or, to put it another way, why no pumas in Africa?
Well…no pumas in Africa because…well shoot, Cheetahs came from America so yeah, them too. Why the hell no pumas in Africa either? Back to tigers tho, is there a geographical tiger barrier of some kind in the middle east?
Insuffient cover. Seriously. Tigers are solitary ambush hunters and need relatively densely wooded land to hunt successfully and compete with the other big cats. They are restricted to forests, mangrove swamps and similar densely timbered country and there have always been large stretches of desert an open savanna between south Asia and the sub-Saharan African forests.
What’s this “were” bit? There still are lions in India. Leopards managed to cover an even greater range.
That’s because lions and leopards have no probelm hunting in deserts and open savanna and so were easily able to cross southern Europe and Asia.
