Man-Animal Interaction: Conflict & Coexistance

[Pckts]

Aditya Singh
Meet T 104 or Blue eyes or Pretty boy, a young tiger that has killed 3 people outside Ranthambhore tiger reserve in a span of 7 months. He was born in an area called Berda inside Ranthambhore national park to a female called Laila (T 41). Sometimes in the beginning of this year his father started pushing him out of his mother’s range. Since larger males have pretty much taken over almost all the area inside the national park, he had to leave the park. On the 2nd of February 2019 he killed and partly ate a woman near a village called Padli. He was tranquillised the next day, fitted with a VHS radio collar and released inside the national park by the Forest Department officials. The very next day he was out of the park again and moved into a largish patch of land that we own and have made wild. He somehow had managed to get rid of his radio collar. For the next four months he spent most of his time here though he would leave this patch of land from time to time.

In late April he was limping due to a wound that we are assuming he got after a fight with another tiger during one of his wanderings. The Forest Department decided to treat his wound and the tiger was tranquillised one again. He was once again fitted with a VHS radio collar and once again shifted to a place inside the national park. Two days later he was back on our land. The reason he was not staying inside the park was because other, more powerful tigers would not let him intrude into their territory.

Sometime in late June, when we got the first few monsoon showers, he left our land and headed towards Keladevi sanctuary, north of the national park. Since he was radio collared his movements should have been monitored but the Forest team from Keladevi was given a wrong tracking frequency for the VHS collar fitted on the tiger. As a result they would not get any signal from the tiger’s radio collar and physically tracking the tiger in that rock habitat was not easy.

Then on 31st July he killed a man near a town called Karauli, in a place that is over 10 miles away from the closest forest. There was a huge uproar in Karauli town and teams of Forest officials were sent out to track and capture the tiger. He was tranquillised a few days later, put in a cage that was driven to Sawai Madhopur town (the Head Quarters of Ranthambhore tiger reserve) where he was kept over night in the cage. His radio collar was changed to a “satellite collar” which is far more efficient. Apparently some of the “advisors” to the Forest Officers based in Jaipur suggested that the tiger should be released “deep in the forest” in Sawai Man Singh sanctuary sough of Ranthambhore national park and this is what was done. This was a bad idea. Ideally he should have been taken out after his second human kill. Everybody living around Ranthambhore was convinced that he will kill again, soon.
He was released in a plateau called Balas which is ringed by villages at its edge - so much for deep in the forest.

The tiger stayed on the plateau for a few days till he recovered from his ordeal and the top of the plateau was cool because of clouds. A few days later the tiger recovered and the clouds cleared making the plateau top very hot pushing the tiger to come down from the plateau top towards habitation. He then walked back again through the national park towards Keladevi sanctuary, and reached the edge of Keladevi after swimming across the flooded Banas River. Then on 12th September he killed the third person. Yesterday he was captured after tranquillisation once again and moved to a caged area specially created INSIDE the national park. He will be kept there to fulfil some stupid National Tiger Conservation Authority’s “protocols” for man-eaters and once these protocols are met he will be tranquillised again and taken to his permanent cage in Jaipur.
The only humane way to deal with them, even though it may not seem like it, is to put them down the moment it is confirmed that the particular animal killed more than one person on different occasions. Putting wild animal in cages is crazy. It take the animal out of the natural order or ecologically dead. And we have far too many captive predators (tens of thousands of them as compared to a few thousand in the wild) - we definitely do not need any more. Big cats breed very well in captivity as natural stresses are not there and most zoos have almost totally stopped breeding big cats

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