Eyes on or hands on? A discussion of human interference

[Shardul]

@Pckts

I don't know why I am not able to explain to you, but this is my last post on this topic as I simply don't have the time and energy for a prolonged back and forth discussion. 

I had an objection to your claiming that human interference (or harrassment or invasion of tiger space or whatever you want to call it) only was to blame for the Ustad episode. I tried to explain you that Ustad killed four people with a clean bite to the neck, which denotes an intention to kill and eat, the classic sign of a man-eater.  Proven by the fact that he ate two of his victims and was going to eat the third one if the body hadn't been retrieved immediately. This is what made t24's case different. Such attacks cannot be blamed on "harrasment" by humans, which you were alluding to. 

You lumped all tiger attacks under one category. You compared t24 with t42 and now another tigress because they attacked some villagers. All tiger attacks on humans aren't the same. When I was talking about attacks, I meant attacks where the tiger intends to eat the human after killing. There has always been a lot of man animal conflict cases in Indian parks simply because of the human pressure. Humans inadvertently venture close to tigers along park boundaries and when this happens, the tiger gets startled and attacks the human in self defence. Such tigers do not view humans as prey, and hence do not deliver a neck bite. Which is the primary reason many such victims manage to survive. And even if the victim dies, the tiger will not be called a man eater, but simply a man killer. Thats why your t24 and t42 comparison was flawed.

This discussion started because you claimed that T-24 was being constantly harrassed by tourists, forest rangers and villagers and hence was forced to turn maneater. To which I responded by saying that tigers can choose to avoid humans and gave the example of hairyfoot. You tried to conter this by mentioning the camera trap image of hairyfoot, which basically proved my point. And then you talked about how much easier it is to track tigers nowadays compared to earlier, as evidenced by the first Tadoba tiger sighting. To me, it is simply because there are more tigers now than before and more humans visiting reserves than before. This debate about whether tigers can avoid humans or not was a separate discussion and off topic here and hence I chose not to continue it further.

Lastly, there is a constant theme to your posts regarding all kinds of man-animal conflict, which goes like this:

human tiger interaction = human harrass tiger = tiger attack/kill human = human fault

I don't agree with this and find it too simplistic, which is what we were debating, or atleast I was.

Hope I have made my stance clear now. Reply