By Shyam Pandharipande, IANS
Nagpur : Wildlife authorities are finding themselves caught in an intricate web of doubts after they shot down a supposedly man-eating tiger outside Taboda-Andhari Tiger Reserve last week.
Apparently, the people on the outskirts of the tiger reserve, about 170 km from here, under whose pressure the animal was killed Friday, are now saying the slain beast was quite different from the one that was rampaging their villages.
Several wildlife experts have been saying that the wildlife personnel ought to have tranquillised the tiger, which killed four people in two months, rather than rushing to kill it.
Police commandos led by a range forest officer and two guards spotted the tiger Friday morning near the carcass of a bullock it had supposedly preyed upon the previous evening and gunned it down.
The wildlife department’s action brought cheer to the villagers who were extremely angry ever since Nov 28 when the tiger tore apart a youth in his farm.
But doubts soon started being raised on whether the beast that killed the bullock Thursday and took four human lives in the last two months was the same that was shot dead.
Rishikesh Ranjan, the Brahmapuri divisional forest officer, insists it is. “We thought it was a tigress; it turns out to be a tiger, but it is the same one. We have finished it. You can relax now,” he told the villagers.
To Ranjan’s disappointment, report of the tiger’s post mortem revealed Saturday that the meat in its abdomen was that of a pig, with no trace of bullock’s or human’s flesh that the man-eater was believed to have consumed in the previous three days.
Ranjan, however, told IANS that the meat sample has been sent to the forensic lab in Nagpur Monday for further confirmation.
“Apart from that, the tiger’s blood samples are being sent to Dehradun’s Wildlife Institute of India for DNA tests that would reveal its lineage,” he added.
Some villagers who had seen the rampaging tigress said it was much bigger in size and had a limp in one of its legs. The slain tiger had no previous injury on its body. Experts said it is generally a wounded or aged tiger incapable of killing its natural prey that turns into a man-eater.
Referring to the weight (147 kg), length (8 feet, 5 inches) and the skull diameter (70 cm) of the killed tiger, wildlife expert Chandrakant Deshmukh surmised the beast’s age could at the most be three and a half years.
“Tigers of this age rarely turn man-eaters,” Deshmukh told IANS but added that it was the same as in the photographs of the animal taken by wildlife experts.
He also concurred with the view of other experts that the tiger should have been tranquillised.
Ranjan agreed that the post mortem report described the slain tiger as sub-adult and that is in the age bracket of 4 to 6 years. He had earlier asserted on the basis of pugmarks and photographs of the beast on prowl that it was at least seven-year old and nine feet long.
B. Majumdar, principal chief conservator of forest (wildlife) in Maharashtra, agreed that ideally the forest personnel should have tried to tranquillise the tiger.
“But there was a risk of the tiger ducking the darts and bolting, which could have led to a law and order situation given that the villagers were already angry with us,” he said.
Asked why no effort was made to tranquillise it, Ranjan said there was no time to bring the tranquillising guns and darts from the forest-range office, which is about 10 km away from the village. Local papers had, however, quoted him as saying that the equipment was not available.
As for the possibility of mistaken identity, Majumdar said: “Even if I grant for the sake of argument that the tiger shot down by my people was different from the man-eater, I would still say it was inevitable and the right thing to do at the moment.”
On Saturday morning, three women of village Govindpur again saw a tiger while they were going to their farm and ran back to the village in panic.
While a group of men who later went to see the tiger didn’t find it, one of them, Hiraji Gaikwad, told reporters that they saw pugmarks of the tiger near the spot.
“I think the killer tigress is very much alive. It was bigger than the tiger that the forest people have killed. We are still worried,” Gaikwad was quoted as saying by a newspaper.