Wildlife
Taming the Tiger
In India, while tigers symbolized courage for Rajput kingdoms, Mughal emperors like Akbar and Jahangir saw a slain tiger as proof of dominance over nature. The British emulated Mughal tiger hunts to assert imperial control — a symbolism now reversed by the country’s conservationists.
Pandemic of the Apes
After a wave of Ebola devastated the Congo Basin’s gorilla population in 2002, one American ecologist embarked on a quest to vaccinate the great apes and, he hoped, stop animal-borne diseases from spreading to humans. Could he convince the vaccine skeptics among his colleagues that it would be worth it?