The doctor stated that in this particular locality the Indians, who elsewhere paid no heed whatever to the puma, never let their women go out after wood for fuel unless two or three were together.  This was because on several occasions women who had gone out alone were killed by pumas.  Evidently in this one locality the habit of at least occasional man-eating has become chronic with a species which elsewhere is the most cowardly, and to man the least dangerous, of all the big cats.

These observations of Doctor Moreno have a peculiar value, because, as far as I know, they are the first trustworthy accounts of a cougar’s having attacked man save under circumstances so exceptional as to make the attack signify little more than the similar exceptional instances of attack by various other species of wild animals that are not normally dangerous to man.

The jaguar, however, has long been known not only to be a dangerous foe when itself attacked, but also now and then to become a man-eater.  Therefore the instances of such attacks furnished me are of merely corroborative value.

In the excellent zoological gardens at Buenos Aires the curator, Doctor Onelli, a naturalist of note, showed us a big male jaguar which had been trapped in the Chaco, where it had already begun a career as a man-eater, having killed three persons.  They were killed, and two of them were eaten; the animal was trapped, in consequence of the alarm excited by the death of his third victim.  This jaguar was very savage; whereas a young jaguar, which was in a cage with a young tiger, was playful and friendly, as was also the case with the young tiger.  On my trip to visit La Plata Museum I was accompanied by Captain Vicente Montes, of the Argentine Navy, an accomplished officer of scientific attainments.  He had at one time been engaged on a survey of the boundary between the Argentine and Parana and Brazil.  They had a quantity of dried beef in camp.  On several occasions a jaguar came into camp after this dried beef.  Finally they succeeded in protecting it so that he could not reach it.  The result, however, was disastrous.  On the next occasion that he visited camp, at midnight, he seized a man.  Everybody was asleep at the time, and the jaguar came in so noiselessly as to elude the vigilance of the dogs.  As he seized the man, the latter gave one yell, but the next moment was killed, the jaguar driving his fangs through the man’s skull into the brain.  There was a scene of uproar and confusion, and the jaguar was forced to drop his prey and flee into the woods.  Next morning they followed him with the dogs, and finally killed him.  He was a large male, in first-class condition.  The only features of note about these two incidents was that in each case the man-eater was a powerful animal in the prime of life; whereas it frequently happens that the jaguars that turn man-eaters are old animals, and have become too inactive or too feeble to catch their ordinary prey.