[The tiger, a 5- to 6-year-old female, attacked a man who had entered the reserve to fish in a stream. Villagers who were working in rice paddies nearby tried to chase away the tiger, and in the ensuing battle, another eight people were injured, one of whom later died, Mr. Srivastava said.]
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari Kumar
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Tiger
cubs in the Indian state of Maharashtra. The world has only about 4,000 tigers
left
in the wild, and most live in India. Credit Bryan Denton for
The
New York Times
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NEW
DELHI — Enraged villagers in
northern India used sticks, spears and machetes to beat a tiger to death after
it attacked several people in a national tiger reserve, the authorities said on
Friday.
A crowd encircled the tiger in a jungle
clearing and hit it in the face as it lay on its back, groaning. The tiger
slowly moved its paws in a futile attempt to block the blows. A disturbing video of the incident resembles a lynching.
The world has only about 4,000 tigers left in
the wild, and most of them live in India. After the video spread on social
media, many Indians expressed outrage, questioning how anyone could kill such
an iconic and endangered animal.
“India’s National Animal Beaten to Death,”
blared a headline across the screen on NDTV, one of India’s biggest television
channels, which aired the video.
India’s effort to protect tigers is in some
ways a victim of its own success. Closer monitoring, new technology and
stricter wildlife policies have led to a sharp increase in the tiger count,
from 1,411 in 2006 to around 2,500 today.
India’s human population and its economy have
been rapidly growing as well, steadily filling in rural areas with farms, roads
and mushrooming towns like Pandharkawada. Many tigers are now running out of
space, and clashing more with humans.
They are spilling out of their dedicated
reserves, roaming along smooth new asphalt highways and skulking through
crowded farmland on a search for territory, mates and prey — such as antelope,
wild pigs, stray cattle and sometimes people.
All across India, islands of forest are
shrinking, and the thin green tendrils on the map — tiger corridors — are being
cut by more roads and more farms. Each tiger, meanwhile, needs miles of thick
forest; the size of its territory depends on the availability of prey. In the
past decade, India has created nearly two dozen more tiger reserves, but many
of them are surrounded by human development on all sides.
The trouble this time began Wednesday
afternoon in the Pilibhit Tiger Reserve, about 200 miles east of New Delhi,
said Vaibhav Srivastava, Pilibhit’s district magistrate.
The tiger, a 5- to 6-year-old female,
attacked a man who had entered the reserve to fish in a stream. Villagers who
were working in rice paddies nearby tried to chase away the tiger, and in the
ensuing battle, another eight people were injured, one of whom later died, Mr.
Srivastava said.
Several dozen men quickly formed a posse
intent on killing the tiger, forestry officials said.
When a small contingent of forest rangers
tried to calm things down, the villagers roughed them up and snatched a mobile
phone to stop them calling for backup. The rangers were armed only with wooden
sticks and were vastly outnumbered, said H. Rajamohan, the tiger reserve’s
field director.
When senior forestry officials tried to reach
the area, villagers blocked them and attacked their cars.
As they did so, others closed in on the
tiger.
According to Mr. Rajamohan, someone speared
the tiger, and as it lay on its back, thrashing in the grass, villagers began
to rain down blows from sticks and machetes.
“Kill! Kill!” several shouted as they pulled
bamboo poles high over their heads and smashed the tiger in the face and body.
Mr. Rajamohan said the tiger crawled into the
jungle, where the mob continued to beat it. Several hours later, the tiger
died. Practically every part of its body was badly injured, including a broken
jaw and many cracked ribs.
India takes tiger killings seriously; some
are investigated like homicides. Authorities in the Pilibhit area said they had
closely studied the video of the killing, identifying 30 suspects, with at
least four arrested.
“It’s a very outrageous incident,” Mr. Rajamohan
said.
He said this was not a spontaneous outburst
of violence.
“This was well planned,” he said.
The penalty in India for killing a tiger can
be more than three years in jail.
Less than a year ago in another tiger reserve
not far from Pilibhit, villagers intentionally ran over a tiger with a tractor,
killing it.
And for more than two years an especially
crafty female tiger, whom the authorities had named T-1, stalked the hills of
central India, suspected of killing at least 13 people. Last fall, forestry
officials launched a military-style operation, deploying drones, thermal
cameras, hundreds of officers and veterinarian sharpshooters mounted on the
backs of elephants, to tranquilize the tiger. After they failed, a sharpshooter
took T-1 out with a bullet.
“People are becoming less tolerant’’ of
tigers, said Bilal Habib, an ecology professor and tiger researcher.
“Everybody is pained,’’ he said.
But, he added, the onus is on humans to find
ways for tigers to survive in an increasingly crowded world.
