How Much Do You Know About the Real ‘Jungle Book’ Animals

The story of Mowgli, a boy living among animals in the Indian forest, remains as vivid and appealing today as it was when Rudyard Kipling included it in The Jungle Book, a series of short fables published in 1894. Mowgli’s adventures have been retold time and again in animated films, television shows, plays, and now a But while the universal tale of friendship, belonging, and community remains steadfast, the state of the animals Kipling featured has not. Even a century ago, the author was concerned with the human impact on nature, and many of the animals he described are now threatened with extinction. Here’s what you should know about the real-life versions ofThe Jungle Book .

Leopards have the largest distribution of any wild cat in the world, but they are also the most persecuted. That’s likely because leopards can live in places with suboptimal habitat, including on the fringes of cities, where they are more likely to come into contact with people. They are also hunted for the illegal wildlife trade, including for use in traditional Chinese medicine.

They’re being killed more and taken into captivity more it’s really becoming a problem, the global wild cat conservation organization.The true identity of Kipling’s “sleepy brown bear” is a bit of an enigma: Baloo’s physical description in the book would suggest a sloth bear, but his diet of nuts and honey runs counter to that species’ insect-eating preferences. Baloo’s name, which simply means “bear” in Hindustani, lends no additional clues.

The problem is that The Jungle Book is fiction, and all of Kipling’s characters are a mixture of imaginary types and real animals, so it’s impossible to know the species for sure, a Kipling scholar at the University of Kent. But Kipling did use 19th-century naturalists’ writings while crafting the book, and one of his sources was that notes that the common Indian sloth bear is “as a rule vegetarian.” Given that sloth bears tend to sleep a lot during the day and can be found throughout India, most scholars agree that Baloo likely fits this label. And Disney's 1967 animated movie has Baloo teaching Mowgli to eat ants.

Sloth bears, which are found only in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and India, are currently listed as “vulnerable” by the IUCN, but they “are quite widespread and safe in India in terms of conservation, although they are under some pressure from trade for their gallbladders,director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s India program. The bears are also abundant in many reserves in India, he adds, “where they are especially adapted to eating termites—and fond of honey.

Mowgli’s jungle foe, the Bengal tiger Shere Khan, is the most imperiled of Kipling’s characters. According to about 3,890 tigers remain in the wild worldwide—about half of which live in India. That’s an apparent increase from 2010, when 3,200 tigers were thought to exist. But not everyone is convinced that the bump truly represents a recovery for the big cats, and new data published by the IUCN shows that global tiger range has declined by 40 percent since 2010.

“A lot of people hailed this as a huge success in tiger conservation,” says Rabinowitz. “In reality, it was a huge success in assessing tiger numbers.” He credits better census-taking strategies and technologies for the apparent population rise.

In India, which invests the most of any country in tiger assessments and protection, the news is a mix of good and bad. Tiger habitat in many areas there continues to fall to development, and poaching in certain places is rampant. But some of the large cats are roaming between strictly protected areas, and populations in other places are stable or increasing. Overall, Rabinowitz says, “India’s doing well and is the major country that’s contributing to the conservation of wild tigers.

Rather than perpetuate a geographic fallacy, the team behind the new Disney movie came up with a creative fix—one that would allow them to have their ape king and correctly place him, too. Today’s King Louie is aGigantopithecus, a massive ape genus that once lived in forests throughout southern China, Southeast Asia, and India.

Experts know little about what the creatures actually looked like, because they have only jaw bones and enamel teeth caps to go on. For now, all we know for sure is that Gigantopithecus fits within the evolutionary tree of Asian apes and that it likely appeared most similar to a modern orangutan—albeit a 9-foot-tall (2.7-meter-tall) version.