Man eater tigress shot dead in India’s Corbett park

A man-eating tigress in Nainital district of Uttarakhand was shot dead last morning after a 44-day hunt for which the state spent about US$112527.

The Hindustan Times reported that the tigress nicknamed the ‘sugarcane tigress’ for its habit of hiding in plantations, had killed two people and injured more than 15 people in two months.

Several hunters and hundreds of officials from Jim Corbett National Park and the state forest department took part in the biggest operation carried out by the state to kill a man-eating tigress.

The hunters had been tracking the tigress for over a month before they finally managed to fire some bullets at the animal that had been hiding in a sugarcane field on Wednesday evening. Though the animal managed to escape the scene after it was shot, the officials launched a search operation in the night using a thermal imaging device to find the tigress.

On last morning, the hunters finally killed the big cat after hunter dogs spotted it.

The people of Ramnagar village celebrated the killing of the tigress that had been terrorising the area for over two and a half years. They paraded the village with the body of the predator. The villagers had performed special poojas before the beginning of the man-eater.

“The people of the area will feel safe now,” Parag Madhukar Dhakate, the western division conservator of forests was quoted as saying by Hindustan Times.

Though the surrounded area of the national park named after the famous British-Indian hunter James Edward “Jim”, Corbett is now free of fear, the incidents of animals attacking human beings raise some serious concerns about forest encroachment.

“We have to evolve effective methods of wildlife management. Problems like this exist in high-density wildlife areas. I think that rescue teams must be set up at the divisional level so that such conflicts can be solved at the earliest. The corridors of tigers and other animals are under threat and we must give proper attention to their conservation,” said conservationist AG Ansari.