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AS CONFLICT BURNS BRIGHT
Since the 1970s, India has made
relentless eff orts to protect the tiger
- not just as an icon but as an umbrella
species, an apex predator that ensures
the well-being of entire ecosystems
that it resides in. A party to the Global
Tiger Recovery Programme endorsed
in 2010, which aims at doubling the
world tiger population by 2022, India
surpassed its set goal of 2100 tigers
in 2014 itself. Tiger numbers have
continued to rise, but with less than
fi ve per cent of the country's landmass
remaining as the tiger’s last refuge, an
increase in breeding populations can
only translate into escalated human-
tiger confl ict.
Tigers involved in confl ict with
humans are invariably portrayed by
the mass media as vicious, bloodthirsty
beasts that pose a serious threat
to human survival. Such slanted,
sensationalised narratives that tarnish
the creature’s public image have
foreseeable long-term negative impacts
on tiger conservation and thus on the
species’ very survival in India. News of
human-tiger confl ict is widely appealing
not just due to the tiger's brilliant and
formidable appearance, but also because
somewhere deep down it reminds us
of our 1.8 million year old wild ancestral
relationship: of man as prey!
Tigers have preyed upon humans
opportunistically as long as we have
shared space. A few of them down the
millennia have become – almost obligate- human predators, or man-eaters
as we call them. But what is a man-
eater? And how can one distinguish
between intentional man-killing or man-
eating incidents and mere accidental
encounters? To understand this we must
fi rst explore tiger behaviour and some
of the drivers of human-tiger confl ict.
Tigers naturally disperse from their
natal territories to establish their own
home ranges as they come of age.
They may also move in search of more
prey-rich areas, or in the quest for a
mate. Old individuals may also gradually
be pushed out of their territories by
younger and stronger adversaries.
Left to itself, a healthy breeding tiger
population will inevitably spill out
of a Protected Area into adjoining
patchy and unprotected forests, which
sometimes provide prey-rich habitats
with species like chital, sambar, nilgai,
wild pig, blackbuck and hog deer. Within
the rest of the tiger distribution range
outside protected forests, domestic
and feral livestock are also consumed.
Artifi cial habitats like sugarcane belts,
which also provide good cover and
prey, act as extended forests for
large carnivores.
Many of these areas are today
classifi ed as territorial forests and are
also units of functional tiger corridors.
With a lot of unprotected habitat being
destroyed, fragmented and converted
to human-use in the recent past, this is
largely where tigers and humans face-
off , sometimes with fatal results.CHANCE ENCOUNTERS
AND SERIAL KILLERSConsider the Dudhwa-Pilibhit landscape
in Uttar Pradesh, where Wildlife Trust
of India (WTI) runs its Terai Tiger
Project in association with the U. P.
Forest Department and with support
from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
With a little over 110 tigers and over
a thousand villages huddled along its
jagged periphery of disconnected forest
patches, the landscape has witnessed 114
attacks by tigers on humans since 2002.
Of these 83 have resulted in human
deaths – but in very few of these cases
have the tigers even consumed human
fl esh, let alone been true man-eaters.Old tigers are sometimes pushed out of their
territories by younger, stronger adversaries and
fi nd themselves hunting in human-use areas.
A camera trap photo of a tigress that travelled over 200 km. southwards from Pilibhit Tiger
Reserve to the swampy banks of the Ganga, just 30 km away from Kanpur, in February 2015.COURTESY: WTI