Man-eating tigress terrorizes Indian villages as death toll rises to 10
© Photo: en.wikipedia.org/ Atul.lonkar/cc-by-sa 3.0
A Bengal tiger resting in the thicket
She can appear anywhere at any time, snatch her next victim and no one will ever see her. People might be standing next to her and she will just be a shocking blur. This is a description of a horror tiger that has been terrorizing villagers in the northern Indian region of Uttar Pradesh. The first three villagers were only killed, the remaining seven devoured – starting with the rump, as she would eat a deer, experts say.
Indian newspapers have taken to call the rampaging tigress a “man-eater.” The beast has killed a dozen over just six weeks and is not likely to stop, unless she is put down.
Conflicts between man and tiger have risen in number lately following an uptake in the populations of endangered Bengal tigers that have rebounded thanks to conservational efforts. Wildlife biologist Ullas Karanth calls them the price of conservation success.
About 40,000 Bengal tigers lived in India at the turn of the 20th century. Now there are only 4,000. The campaign to save these rare wild felines eventually succeeded in shoring up their populations, but the fragile condition of their native habitats drove these half-ton beasts out of the woods where they ran into human villages.
The tigress that has been attacking people across the Uttar Pradesh border is believed to traverse great stretches of land in a day and is apparently comfortable wandering deep into human territory.
The first victim was reported on December 29 when a ravaged corpse of a farmer was found in a sugarcane field. A week later, a young man described the second attack, in which the tiger jumped out of sugarcane thicket, grabbed his sister by the neck and dragged her away right before his eyes.
A short while later, a worker in his 40s got out of a car to relieve himself on a roadside in the Jim Corbett National Park. His companions were alerted to his screams and found the man some 60 feet into the forest, the flesh torn off his thighs.
The string of tiger attacks enraged the locals who trapped forestry staff inside their outpost demanding that the cat be taken out.
Since then, trackers have been piecing the portrait of the beast: paw prints five inches wide suggest a female; intact canines suggest that she’s a breeding. Belinda Wright, executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, says one paw does not lay flat on the ground meaning she may be injured. This at least could explain why she started attacking humans.
People believe that once a carnivorous animal has tasted of human flesh it becomes a man-eater. Experts add that they must be killed at once, because a man-eater is extraordinarily difficult to capture. “They just become like ghosts… People might be standing next to her and she will just be a shocking blur,” Ms Wright said.
Across the state border in Uttar Pradesh, gunmen have been summoned and given license to kill. “Now there is no alternative except to kill her. Otherwise she will keep on killing people. It is a very dicey game, which is very dangerous, and thrilling, as well,” says Sanjay Singh, a registered marksman who has been following the tiger’s trail since the cat killed her seventh.
Voice of Russia, New York Times
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