This Is What Happens When Tigers Try to Sneak Up on Small Bears

In North America, full-grown bears are seldom forced to fight predators for their lives. But things are different for the sloth bear of the Indian subcontinent. The animals go head-to-head with some of the fiercest predators of all: tigers.

While the big cats are fearsome, they don’t find easy prey in the sloth bears, which are the size of a small black bear. For a study in the journal Ecology and Evolution published this month, researchers showed that tigers in India’s national parks easily sneak up on sloth bears, which often seem blissfully unaware that they are at risk of becoming cat food. But once the tiger strikes, the bears often manage to put the fearsome felines on the back paw.

The researchers hope the findings could help inform strategies to reduce conflict between humans and sloth bears, which are considered a vulnerable species.

Sloth bears are not themselves predatory. They live mostly on termites, ants and fruit. But they have developed fierce reputations of their own among people who share their habitats — reports suggest they are even responsible for more attacks on people than any large carnivore in the world.

Thomas Sharp, a wildlife ecologist with Wildlife SOS, an organization that works to conserve Indian wildlife, and an author of the study, has been asking local people why sloth bears are so aggressive since he started studying them 20 years ago. “The answer I always got from people was, ‘It’s because they fight with tigers,’” he said.