India: ‘Man-eating’ tiger shot dead after killing 9 people

Posted9 October 2022, 10:18

Inde: ‘Man-eating’ tiger shot dead following killing 9 people

After a vast operation, the police killed a feline which had caused several deaths, including an 8-year-old child.

An Indian tiger. (Illustrative photo)

AFP

A tiger nicknamed “the man-eater of Champaran” has been shot dead by Indian police following killing at least nine people, during a major operation involving 200 people including elephant trackers, police said on Sunday. responsible. The big cat had been terrorizing residents around Valmiki Tiger Reserve in Champaran, eastern India, killing at least six people for a month including a woman and her eight-year-old son on Saturday. Even before these last two deaths, authorities had labeled the tiger – believed to be a three- or four-year-old male – a “man-eater”, meaning it might be put down. Previous attempts to neutralize the animal had failed.

“Two teams entered the forest on two elephants on Saturday followingnoon and a third waited where we thought the tiger was going to come out, and we fired (…) to kill it there,” said know AFP Kiran Kumar, local police chief. As villagers banged on tin containers, it took the team of eight snipers and regarding 200 members of the forest department nearly six hours to complete the operation, Mr Kumar said. .

Human expansion involved

Conservationists blame the rapid expansion of human settlements around forests and major wildlife routes – such as elephants and tigers – as the source of increased clashes between humans and animals in some parts of India. Nearly 225 people lost their lives in tiger attacks between 2014 and 2019 in India, according to government data. More than 200 tigers were killed by poachers or by electrocution between 2012 and 2018, these statistics reveal. India is home to around 70% of the world’s tigers, with 2,967 tigers in the country in 2018.

(AFP)