( CNN ) '' The Law of the Jungle , which never orders anything without a reason , forbids every beast to eat Man . '' I still remember the first time I read the passage from `` The Jungle Book , '' heart racing beneath my pajamas covered with The Six Million Dollar Man . `` The real reason for this is that man-killing means , sooner or later , the arrival of white men on elephants , with guns , and hundreds of brown men with gongs , rockets and torches . Then everybody in the jungle suffers , '' Rudyard Kipling wrote . I probably understood that tiger attacks were fairly rare in Milwaukee , but to my 11-year-old brain , Kipling was dropping wisdom that just might keep me alive on the next expedition into the weedy lot behind Piggly Wiggly . `` The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenseless of all living things , and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him . '' Reading that passage 35 years later , while rolling through the very forest that inspired the classic , the irony in that line finally clicks . When we hear the woof of a frightened deer and my guide kills the engine , my grown-up heart pounds once again . It is a sign that there may be big cats nearby . `` I wonder who will be the last person to see a tiger in the wild ? And are they alive today ? '' These are the questions that launched this stop on `` The Wonder List , '' and they led us to a much bigger question about life in the 21st century : Is the planet still big enough for man and man-eater ? India is about one-third the size of the continental United States , with four times as many people . That kind of human pressure has changed Kipling 's `` Law of the Jungle '' in dramatic ways . According to the animal conservation group Born Free , there are more tigers in cages in Texas than in the forests of India . So I set out to understand how and why . Having covered the poaching of African animals to feed the huge market for Asian medicine , I assumed the demand for tiger-skin rugs in Dubai or tiger-bone wine in Beijing would be the biggest threat to this endangered cat . Can tigers claw their way back from the brink ? But it turns out that tiger-human conflict is a much bigger problem . Almost half a billion rural Indians have no plumbing and answer nature 's call by squatting in the forest . Most tiger attacks happen when these people are mistaken for prey , and most tiger kills come in the angry hours that follow , as friends and neighbors of the victim seek revenge . And so , a new specialty in conservation is the art of tiger conflict mediation . It is not easy to convince a frightened farmer that the cat that ate his cow is more valuable alive than caged or dead . But these efforts , along with a more pointed anti-poaching campaign , seem to be paying off . The latest tiger census counted 2,226 big cats in India , a 30 % increase over the previous count in 2011 . If the estimates hold , this would make India the only country in the world with a growing tiger population . But the human population is growing much faster . Maintaining a healthy population of apex predators is just one new challenge on a planet that will welcome a couple billion more people in just the next generation . You 'll be surprised by the others as we seek India 's magnificent treasures -- both natural and man-made -- on the next episode of `` The Wonder List . ''
There are more tigers in cages in Texas than in the wild in India , a conservation group says . Tiger-human conflict is a major problem affecting the big cats .