Tabaqui

"Shere Khan, the great one, has shifted his hunting grounds, or so he has told me."

- Tabaqui

Tabaqui is a jackal and Shere Khan's sidekick in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, thus making him the secondary antagonist, replacing Kaa in some versions.

He is a scavenger who is despised by the wolves and has a tendency to fawn on Shere Khan and greatly hates being insulted. However, he is very cowardly and usually prefers flee to fight. He is also known to be a liar, so Mowgli is often informed by Bagheera and Baloo that Tabaqui is not to be trusted.

Tabaqui also appears in other animated films and TV adaptations of The Jungle Book, but in most of them he appears as a hyena, not a jackal. In Chuck Jones' made-for-TV special adaptation of the book, the way Tabaqui is animated gives him a striking resemblance to Wile E. Coyote. In the Jetlag film, he appears as a rusty-spotted cat. Tabaqui is to appear in Andy Serkis' upcoming version of The Jungle Book and he will be played by Tom Hollander, who also played Lord Cutler Beckett and Isaacs.

His name means "Dish-Licking Dog".

Trivia

 * He was originally set to appear in the 1967 Disney film as a minor antagonist and voiced by the late Bill Thompson, but he was deleted, along with Buldeo. A possible reason why he was cut is because a wolf who tried to eat the protagonist in a Disney film already happened in The Sword in the Stone.
 * His name is given to one of the minor antagonist's men in the 1994 version.