Find the 'real life' version of the animals in 'The Jungle Boy' The Jungle Book

At least one species of creature appeared in Disney's latest "live action" the Jungle Book blockbuster.

While the stories of friendship, homosexuality and the community drawn from the film are always firmly in the audience, the existence of the animals in Kipling's work is not so. Even a century ago, the author was worried about human effects on nature and many of the animals he described now are in great danger. This article will help you understand the "real life" version of those pitiful creatures.

The Jungle Book - Disney's 1967 animated version

For those who do not know The Jungle Book, this is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling published in 1894 revolving around the story of the adventures of the boy Mowgli - a boy. Orphans are nurtured by wolf dogs in the Indian jungle. After a while of living and feeling the threat if you continue to stay in this natural roof by Shere Khan - a ferocious tiger that has been attacked by humans, Mowgli has decided to leave this "wolf village". and begin to embark on an amazing adventure under the guidance of Bagheera and Baloo. During the journey, the green forest boy faced many other vicious creatures like Kaa - the enchanted python or King Louie - a gorilla with the ability to speak humanity to force Mowgli to reveal. The recipe for the flickering "red flower", called Fire.

Black Bagheera

The black leopard like Bagheera is not an extinct animal, but it is precisely the jaguar color variants discovered in Asia and Africa as well as jaguars originating in South America. Kipling acknowledged this when he described Bagheera as "all ink-black, but certain lines of light on the body spotting like a sheet of silk with waves."

Black newspapers are "black" variants of jaguars

Jaguars have the largest habitat habitat in the cat family in the world but they are also the most harmed species. It is likely that because jaguars can live in many places where living conditions do not necessarily reach the optimal level as the edge of the city - where they are more likely to be exposed to humans. They are also hunted by humans for the purpose of trafficking illegal wildlife, such as those used to produce medicine in traditional Chinese medicine.
"They are being killed and imprisoned more and more - this is really a problem," said Alan Rabinowitz, CEO of Panthera, a global organization that preserves wild cats.
He and other experts have watched the "population" of jaguars to see if they should reconsider the conservation level of cats, classified by the International Nature Conservation Organization ( International Union for Conservation of Nature - IUCN) to convert them from "near threatened" to "vulnerable".

Baloo Bear

The true identity of Kipling's "grizzly bear" is a bit of a mystery: The description of Baloo's physical story is a sloth bear, but the whole diet of nuts and honey goes against all the documents that say this animal likes to eat insects. The name Baloo - in Hindustani simply means "bear" has no additional suggestions.

Baloo bears are likely to be lazy bears

"The problem here is that The Jungle Book is just a fiction, and all the characters of Kipling have a mixture of real-life animals and the imagination of the author. Therefore, it's impossible. be sure of each of those animals ". This is the assertion of Kaori Nagai - a researcher who studies Kipling at Kent University. However, Kipling also used the records of nineteenth-century naturalists while writing a draft of this book and one of the sources cited was the natural history document of 1884 Note that lazy bears "are considered a habitual vegetarian". For this reason, lazy bears tend to sleep more during the day and can be found in most of India. Most scholars also agree that Baloo has the ability to match this behavior. And Diney's 1967 animated film also features a scene where Baloo teaches Mowgli how to eat ants.

Lazy bears found only in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India are now included in IUCN's "Vulnerable" list but they "live quite popularly and safely in India in terms of security. exist, although they are at risk of being hunted for gall bladder for illegal trafficking "(Ullas Karanth, director of Indian Wildlife Conservation). Karanth also added that these bears also live a lot in Indian sanctuaries - "where they are especially adept at eating the termites and very hungry for honey".

Shere Khan Tiger

Mowgli's enemies - Shere Khan tiger - belonging to the Bengal tiger, are a major threat to the characters in Kipling's work. According to new statistics, the total tiger population worldwide has about 3,890 children and about half of them live in India. This number increased significantly compared to 2010 - when only 3,200 children were thought to exist. However, not everyone is convinced that this increased figure represents a recovery of "big cats" and data recently published by the IUCN also indicate that the tiger's habitat range globally has decreased by about 40% compared to 2010.

Tiger Shere Khan is the most dangerous animal in Kipling's work

"A lot of people have praised this as a huge success in tiger conservation," Rabinowitz said. "In fact, it is a huge success in assessing tiger numbers." He places more faith in the strategies and technologies used in the census for this apparent increase.

In India - where there is the most investment in any country in assessing and protecting tigers, there is good news and bad news. The habitat of tigers in many areas here continues to reduce the development and the phenomenon of hunting still occurs widely in certain locations. However, a few large-sized cats began to move between strictly protected areas and the "population" in other places was quite stable or increased. Rabinowitz said that in general "India is doing quite well and it is also the country that contributes primarily to the conservation of wild tigers."

Old wolf Akela and Raksha

"Parents" adopted Mowgli as dogs. They are simply wolves living in India. David Mech, a senior research scientist at the US Geological Survey, said: "Wolves - the northern wolf (Canis Lupus), live in the perimeter so they have faces. All over the world, Indian wolves are similar to wolves living in Minnesota, Canada or anywhere else.

Currently, wolves are really "gentle" in India

Listed on the "least concern" list by IUCN, wolves live safely in India - where they live scattered in many rural areas of the country. However, what they don't do is not adopt babies. According to Mech, "There is no evidence of a child being really raised by wolves."

Kaa Snake

Kaa - the sly snake belonging to the Indian python - a nonvenomous snake family that can be up to 21 feet long. The cars are the biggest threat of python, followed by the destruction of the habitat and intentional killing of the villagers.

Non-venomous pythons are facing the risk of extinction due to habitat loss and illegal hunting

Bubesh Guptha, a biologist who specializes in the wild world at Pitchandikulam Forest in southern India, said, "People are afraid and kill pythons because they confuse them with poisonous snakes." The snakes are also always in high demand for foreign trade in animals. Until now, python has been listed on the "near threatened" list and India has also set up a program to raise animals and rehabilitation centers for snakes, next door. prohibiting illegal trading activities.

Monkey King Louie

King Louie gorillas are always associated with the wild world in movies. Kipling did not put this character in his book, but the introduction of a funky orangutan that swings on the vine branches in the 1967 animated film immediately caught the attention. . However, one problem is that orangutans do not live in India. Threatened monkeys are found only in the degraded tropical rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra.

Gigantopithecus model at a museum

Instead of retaining this geographic mistake, Disney's production group The Jungle Book 2016 corrected by implementing a new idea - a creation that allowed them to have a real "gorilla" and put this character in its place. Today's King Louie gorilla is Gigantopithecus - a gibbon who once lived in forests throughout southern China, Southeast Asia and India.

Experts know very little about these organisms, including what they really look like because they have only a few jaw and jaw teeth to study. Today, all we know for sure is that Gigantopithecus fits into the Asian gibbon's "evolutionary tree" and is likely very similar to modern orangutans - though only about 9 feet tall (about 2 feet, about 2 feet). 7 meters).

The youngest fossils of Gigantopithecus date back about 400,000 years, although Russell L. Ciochon, an anthropologist at the University of Iowa, is currently studying caves to find evidence of the emergence of species. This is more recent. Regardless of the timeliness, Ciochon agrees on the arrival of Gigantopithecus in the 2016 version of "Green Forest Boy".

Lower jaw of Gigantopithecus gibbon

"I have studied Giganto for a long time and now that I have found it to be a movie star," he said, "Except for dinosaurs, you don't really see something that happened very well. big with these extinct creatures ".

The surgeon Franz Weidenreich (1873-1948) hypothesized that Gigantopithecus was a huge ancestor of modern humans.

A statue of a museum painter about the prehistoric Gigentopithecus, at the San Diego Men's Museum in California

At that time Weidenreich only conducted research with four teeth. Over the decades when more jaws were discovered and more teeth appeared, scientists rejected Weidenreich's opinion and began building many models based on the theory that Gigantopithecus was a giant ape from prehistoric times. The jaws are similar in shape to gibbons. Their teeth also have structural similarities to the ancient Sivapithecus that existed about 10 million years ago.

One of the rare discovered jaw bones of Gigantopithecus.In the collection of Wooster College, Ohio State, USA

No fossils of other parts of this organism have been found, so it is difficult to conclude much about them. The size of the gibbon is estimated based on the size of the teeth and jaw, and its structure is said to resemble the gibbons, ie, bending to stand with all four limbs. Assuming this is an ape and not a giant human (hominini) strain (hominini is a pretty new category that implies a strain that is closely related to humans), is Gigantopithecus likely The Yeti snowman, or the Bigfoot picnic in today's stories? Although it is thought that this creature was extinct about 200,000 years ago, it is near the end of the Pleistocene period, but some people think that it may still exist today.