Tigress released into the wild kills 55-year-old farmer near Bor wildlife sanctuary

The tigress had partly eaten the victim’s body and had sat near it for about 6 hours (Express Photo by Joydip Suchandra Kundu)

FATAL attack by a tigress on a man near Bor wildlife sanctuary on Tuesday evening has re-opened the debate over release of such big cats in the wild after capture from trouble-torn tiger-human conflict areas. The two-year old tigress T27C1, had killed 55-year old farmer Bhivaji Harle when he was taking his bullocks home near Wadala village in Wardha district. The tigress was captured from Brahmapuri tehsil of Chandrapur district in July after she had killed two humans and attacked four others leading to massive pubic outrage. Earlier, the Principal Chief Conservator of Forest (Wildlife) A K Mishra had issued shoot orders but a wildlife activist had moved the High Court here alleging flouting of procedure norms in issuing the shoot orders. The HC had quashed the order and had directed the officials to capture the tigress alive.

But after the capture, the PCCF had drafted a committee to decide the fate of the tigress. The committee had recommended its release back in the wild. The PCCF had then directed the release in Bor Wildlife Sanctuary in Wardha district. Mishra defended the decision despite Tuesday’s incident. “The tigress has been there for the past 50 days, during which she never stalked a human being. No human being has reported its sighting, which means she was shying away from humans. On Tuesday, the man happened to come close to her after the bullocks ran away. So, he became her inadvertent and not intended victim,” he told The Indian Express.

Asked if her consistent movement close to human settlement wasn’t seen as an alarm , Mishra said, “About 40 pc of our tigers live outside Protected Areas (PAs) and close to human settlements and also feed on cattle. So, that’s not an issue.”

The tigress had partly eaten the victim’s body and had sat near it for about 6 hours making it difficult to believe that Harle was a chance victim.Mishra has, meanwhile, decided to windup the experiment and recapture the tigress to be put back in the cage for rest of her life. The attack, however, happened despite promise of round-the-clock monitoring. Said Former PCCF Wildlife B Majumdar : “It is relevant that the past cases of similarly placed animals attacking humans on being released with tragic consequences should have deterred the department from doing it again.”

Poonam Dhanwate of TRACT, a wildlife NGO with wide experience in dealing with conflict situations, said, “this tigress with history of conflict shouldn’t have been released in the wild again. Previous episodes indicate that such individuals get into conflict again and the pain is only shifted to a new area. Human safety should always be a priority in such decision making. It will be unfortunate to invite unnecessary wrath against wildlife in general as a reaction to such episodes.”

Nitin Desai of Wildlife Protection Society of India points out a contradiction in the general thinking of the forest department as evident from two episodes. “when iconic tiger Jai had gone missing from Umred-Karhandla wildlife sanctuary in 2016, it was said that an individual tiger shouldn’t be seen as a loss to overall cause of conservation. But in the instant case, such a heavy stress was led on an individual tigress’s importance in being back to wild,” he says, adding, “if this would have been avoided, public animosity towards tiger could also have been avoided, particularly in Bor, where there was no history of man-tiger conflict.”

Kishore Rithe of Satpuda foundation, ex-member of National Board for Wildlife, who had strongly recommended the tigress’s release said, “there was no evidence to believe that the tigress had turned a man-eater in Bramhapuri since it hadn’t attacked anyone near villages. So she was fit to be released in the wild. And we were not looking at it as individual tigress but one with a capacity to give birth to many cubs. But the decision to send it to Bor was that of the PCCF. I had suggested Nsvegaon National Park which was closer to Bramhapuri and a fully vacant forest, as the ideal option.”

Rithe, however, pointed out, “monitoring should have been done in a way that the monitoring team always remained between the tigress and human settlements. In this case that caution doesn’t appear to have been observed.”