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The Menacing Tiger

Only a couple of generations back, tigers were one of the great dangers of travel in Southeast Asia. One European traveller writes of the precautions necessary for ox-cart caravans only one night out of Chiang Mai, livestock carefully herded and guarded, but the big cats attacking with extraordinary speed, cunning and boldness, carrying off dogs, the smaller livestock and even children unless the utmost efforts to hold them off were maintained.

Not surprisingly, then, this particular animal has left its mark in the popular psyche, nowhere better displayed than in Thai proverbs. What's most commemorated is the animal's ferocity. 'The leopard does not change his spots,' runs the English saying, for which the local equivalent is, seu-a mai ting lai - 'The tiger does not lose his stripes'. It's cunning too, however, so that appropriately we are told, seu-a son lep - 'The tiger hides its claws'. Its ability to dissemble is acknowledged again in the saying, nah neu-a, jai seu-a - 'The face of a deer, but the heart of a tiger'. Where we have 'Out of the frying pan into the fire', the Thai say, nee seu-a, ba jorakhe - 'Fleeing a tiger, only to confront a crocodile.' On the other hand, the Chinese speak of 'Killing a chicken to frighten a monkey', the local equivalent being, khian seu-a hai wu-a klua: 'Drawing a tiger to frighten a buffalo'. Once again the menace the animal represents is shown in the saying, yiap tin seu-a - 'To walk into tiger territory', where we would warn against 'Treading on dangerous ground'.

But of course, in invoking the tiger, it's also human qualities or defects that attention is being directed to. Someone who expects benefits without doing anything to deserve them (wanting profit without investment, for example) is hoping to jap seu-a meu-a plow - 'Catch a tiger with the bare hands'. Then again, a lecher that in days gone by we might have referred to as 'a ladies' man,' is known in the local idiom as a seu-a pu-ying - a tiger with, or among, the women. Equally colourfully, a hypocrite can be called a seu-a tow jumsin - an old tiger pretending to meditate (or, 'follow the Buddhist precepts').

However, alive and lively though our striped and ferocious friend is in the Thai mind, he's not much of a presence these days in what's left of the Thai forest: and once again there's a somewhat enigmatic proverb that takes note of the fact. Nam pueng reu-a, seu-a pueng ba is a sign you can see in the Doi Suthep National Park, intended to encourage conservation of the environment - 'A boat needs the water, and a tiger needs the forest'.

Not a sentiment earlier Thai generations would have shown much enthusiasm for, perhaps, but definitely a sign of these more-or-less tiger-less times.