He bit through my left arm. Bones crunched. I could hear them, feel them

It was a chilly autumnal morning in October 2009 when I woke in my tent in Primorsky Krai, Russia, near the border with North Korea and China. My team of six had been catching wild Siberian tigers with snares and putting radio collars on them before releasing them, so we could better understand their behaviour and protect the endangered species.

I’d been working as a tiger biologist for 14 years, and had tagged about 70 tigers with my team. Each morning, we’d travel in pairs to check the snares – they consisted of heavy-duty cables attached to a tree. Each was equipped with a radio transmitter that would alert us to a capture so we could anaesthetise the animal as quickly as possible to minimise their stress, before fitting a collar and releasing it back into the wild.