See a tiger or leopard in the wild

“Silence prevailed all around and we were holding our breath! I was speculating – will that be a pack of wild dogs or may be a leopard or may be a tiger himself? [...] I heard a loud sound – a sound that resembled like an old lorry accelerating to the full - it was a roar! Believe me, loudness of that roar in the close quarter will make any one dead that moment itself!! Our eyes were eagerly scanning the undergrowth that skirted the glade – I was ready with my camera but I felt it was not steady because my hands were trembling heavily. Motionless, in utter silence we sat impatiently!! Something caught my eyes – a big mass of something brownish-yellow in color with blackish stripes. It was breaking cover and was moving to the glade. I couldn’t believe my eyes!! A Tiger in our plain view - a beautiful creature, royal looks and like a king he stood with his head up. He was angled in such a way that we were able to get his full body view. He intently scanned the surrounding. In sheer excitement, I clicked my camera hysterically.”

“That I just so happened to be reading “How Forests Think” [...] I looked out the window, which caused me to notice some thing standing out amidst the green and tan Lantana camara thicket, and that because I had just been reading about symbols and semiotics I was thinking about the use of animals as icons in how the Forest Department communicates about conserving animals to tourists (Figure 2), so that when I saw the orange and black and white against the green and tan landscape I thought it was a literal sign of a tiger, and that my mind’s ability to recognize this set of colors as a tiger instead of only as a symbol of a tiger was because I was jarred into the present by the man behind me shouting “Tiger! Tiger!” in Tamil, and that I knew the Tamil word for “tiger” and was able to recognize it as “tiger” and therefore came to realize the sign of tiger I saw at the edge of the forest was in fact an actual, living, breathing animate tiger standing completely still facing the road, that all of these things came to pass in less than two seconds [...] leaving me with an overwhelming sense of elation and gratitude for seeing a tiger that I did not know I would feel”