ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris)

[Sully]

Pretty interesting. Reintroduced tigers in Sariska were judged by locals to be more bold, and less afraid of humans than the extinct population before them. Overall, they didn't give way to people the way the previous population did.

An excerpt: Participants generally agree that people and tigers traversed the landscape for the last several decades without high levels of human-tiger conflict because “The old tigers … were not dangerous for us…. They used to run away [when they heard] human voices.” While the new tigers, “they don’t run. They don’t fear us” (Male, ~2 km from Sariska). An older woman in the group retold a similar story, saying “if we encounter them then they don’t leave our way, they just block our path, they are not like the old tigers” (Female, ~2 km from Sariska).

Human-Tiger (Re)Negotiations: A Case Study from Sariska Tiger Reserve, India

Abstract:


This case study explores the reintroduction of tigers to Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan, India, highlighting how the (re)negotiation between people and tigers is a struggle rooted in place and territory, with boundaries co-constructed by human and nonhuman actors. While the reintroduction came only three years after the official admission of complete species loss, tigers as a dominant force on the landscape were absent for more than a decade in some places. Accordingly, the people of Sariska see the reintroduced tigers as foreigners without place-knowledge and as disturbers of the interspecies boundaries created by the interactions of Sariska’s original tigers and many generations of local people. This study speaks to conservation sciences and animal geography to contribute to the scientific knowledge of the human dimensions of rewilding, still a nascent area of restoration ecology specifically in the case of apex predators in the global south.
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