tiger preserve – Pain In The Bud

At Almost 700lbs, Hercules The Tiger Is A Symbol Of His Species’ Comeback

The huge Bengal may be the biggest tiger in India, and has already become a draw for tourists visiting from other parts of the country.

Hercules looks like a heavyweight boxer reincarnated as a tiger.

The massive apex predator was virtually unknown outside of India’s Kumaon district until this week, when a tourist posted a short video of the nearly 700-pound animal lumbering out of the brush and into clear view as he crossed a dirt path between rural villages.

The Bengal, who may be the biggest cat in India, is majestic. His gait is leisurely, as if he knows that anyone or anything he may encounter will clear a path the moment they see him. His fur doesn’t hide the rippling muscle underneath, and as he spots a group of tourists with cameras aimed at him, he bares his teeth momentarily, then pretends as if they don’t exist as he takes his sweet time crossing the path.

“In my entire career, I have never seen such a giant tiger,” Prakesh Arya, a divisional forest officer, told the New Indian Express.

For conservationists, tourists and the government of India, whose national animal is the Bengal, Hercules’ existence is proof that Project Tiger is on the right track. The project is a national effort to save the iconic species, grow its population, and protect it from poachers.

Hercules’ territory includes Ramnagar, a town in northern India known as they gateway to Jim Corbett National Park. The preserve is named after the renowned tiger hunter who took down the Demon of Champawat, a tigress who had killed at least 435 people during a decade-long rein of terror.

Corbett, who described tigers as “large-hearted gentlemen” who were unfairly maligned, was known for his prowess in hunting down man-eating tigers and leopards, but later in life he turned to conservation, realizing that Earth’s biggest cats were in danger of extinction if drastic efforts weren’t taken to save them. That was a century ago.

Now India devotes significant resources to their protection and well-being, with an entire corps of dedicated professional rangers and anti-poaching teams tracking the animals and constantly patrolling the vast country’s 58 tiger preserves, which cover 82,836.44 square kilometers.

A large tiger cools off in water on a hot day. Credit: Warren Garst/Wikimedia Commons, Colorado State University Library

For tigers like Hercules, having large contiguous ranges gives them the chance to live the way nature intended. Experts say the abundance of prey in the reserves, especially in the region Hercules calls home, has resulted in larger, more robust cats of the type that were once a memory.

“This is a clear symbol of the rich biodiversity and the success of our management efforts in this forest area,” Arya said.

In turn, the presence of the iconic cats has revitalized tourism. Tourists who have seen Hercules described the experience as “overwhelming.”

“Seeing ‘Hercules’ was an unforgettable experience,” Priya Sharma, a tourist from Delhi, told the Express.

Rangers In India Race To Capture Man-Eating Tiger Before Mobs Kill It

Angry locals say they’ll kill the tiger if forest rangers do not after the predator ambushed and ate a mother of two in southern India on Friday.

Forest rangers are on the hunt to capture a man-eating tiger who killed a woman and dragged her body into a forest on Friday, while frustrated locals say they’ll destroy the predator if the government does not.

The victim, a 45-year-old woman named Radha, was employed by a local coffee plantation in Mananthavady and was harvesting coffee beans when the big cat ambushed her, according to multiple reports in local media. Mananthavady is a city of about 47,000 people in southern India surrounded by rural farmland.

A Thunderbolt team — a special forces unit trained in counter-insurgency — was patrolling the area when they found blood and signs of a struggle. They followed the tiger’s pug marks into a nearby forest, where they found Radha’s body “half eaten,” the New Indian Express reported.

The victim was a mother of two and was buried in a service earlier today, according to the news service Bharat.

The attack and the livid response of people in the area highlight the conflicts that India must manage as it works to save tigers, the country’s critically endangered national animal, while also protecting the public. India’s government has relocated thousands of families away from the vast country’s 27 tiger preserves, but the big cats are oblivious to the boundaries of the preserves.

Earlier this month, people living in several contiguous towns over a stretch of more than 130 miles in eastern India barricaded themselves indoors, refusing to leave for work or to travel to local markets, after a pair of hungry tigers had drifted off a preserve and had begun to feast on local livestock.

A tiger who was seized and relocated from a roadside zoo operated by Joseph “Tiger King” Maldonado-Passage. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In Mananthavady, locals threatened a hartal, a form of strike aimed at gaining concessions from the government, if the tiger is not killed. Forest rangers and local government leaders said they would capture and relocate the tiger, who has been spotted on a trail camera, but the locals say that’s not good enough.

“If you can’t shoot the tiger, then shoot us instead,” one protester told forestry officials.

Others said they’d take matters into their own hands if authorities don’t kill the tiger. It’s not an empty threat: in 2019, a mob of enraged villagers beat a tigress to death after she attacked a person.

Radha was the third person to be killed by tigers in the area since 2023, when two farmers were killed by the endangered apex predators in incidents about 11 months apart.

In addition to the anger and grief felt by family and friends of the victims, the government’s compensation program is also controversial. Radha’s family will receive ₹11 lakh, according to reports, which was about $12,800 in USD according to exchange rates on Jan. 25.

The program has been condemned by people who say the government is wrong to put an arbitrary monetary value on human life, and in recent years there have been attempts to provide families with resources like job training in addition to monetary compensation. The issue remains a sore spot and a topic of ongoing litigation because the government did not compensate victim families for decades, and does not automatically provide compensation if the victims trespass onto preserve land.

Tigers are the largest and most dangerous of all cat species, and are arguably the most dangerous land animal on the planet, but the vast majority of them do not attack humans and give people a wide berth. Unlike most other felids, they enjoy water and swimming, especially in warm climates. Credit: Warren Garst/Wikimedia Commons

In the meantime, a team comprised of rangers, veterinarians, expert trackers and others — totaling about 100 people — was racing to get to the tiger before the mobs do, utilizing drones, traps and thermal imaging cameras to find and capture the elusive predator.

“The animal is still roaming in the same vicinity, and we are strengthening local patrols to prevent further casualties,” KS Deepa, chief conservator of forests in the region, told local media.

Most tigers who turn man-eater do so because they can no longer take down their usual prey without difficulty, either due to old age or because their teeth are damaged. The infamous Champawat tigress, who killed 436 people during a decade-long reign of terror from the late 1890s through 1907, turned man-eater when a hunter’s bullet shattered one of her canines.

It’s wasn’t clear what forestry officials planned to do with the tiger if it’s captured, but they told reporters they are forbidden by law from killing the animal unless other options are exhausted.

“There are three ways to capture the tiger,” A.K. Saseendran, India’s minister of forests and wildlife, told The Hindu. “We will try to cage it as the first step. If that fails, we will try to tranquilize it and move it out of Wayanad. Killing the tiger is the last resort.”

The Cost Of Living With Tigers: People In Rural India Hide Indoors As Foresters Track 2 Hungry Big Cats

Tiger attacks are a real danger in rural India, where the big cats kill people and livestock. To protect the species, the government pulls off a difficult balancing act aimed at minimizing inter-species conflict.

In his memoir, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, legendary tiger hunter (and later staunch conservationist) Jim Corbett described how he and his men arrived to find a ghost town when they tracked a man-eating tiger to a rural village.

Every door was closed and locked, shutters were closed tight, and despite the fact that it was harvest time, not a single person was working the nearby fields.

The people who lived there had good reason to be petrified. The infamous Champawat tigress had killed more than 430 people by that point, including a young woman from the village just a few days earlier. Usually the tigress would vanish from an area after a kill, frustrating locals and hunters by popping up virtually anywhere in a 50-mile radius, but for some reason she stuck around the village and sat on the outskirts at night, keeping the local people awake with her calls.

Corbett’s famed hunt of the “demon of Champawat” happened in 1907, and although it might sound like a problem from the past, it’s current reality for people in parts of India, Nepal and, to a lesser extent, the sparsely populated mountain forests in eastern Russia.

In Garwha and Ranchi, two towns in eastern India about 215km (133 miles) apart, “villagers have stopped using forest routes to reach markets and are reluctant to leave their homes for work,” the Times of India reported on Monday.

That’s because hungry tigers have been on the prowl, demonstrating little fear of people as they help themselves to livestock. Between Jan. 1 and Jan. 6, the tigers killed and ate three cattle and a buffalo.

Siberian tiger — Tigers require large, contiguous tracks of land measuring in the hundreds of square miles. India and Russia have both set aside massive preserves for the apex predators to increase their numbers in the wild. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

So far they’ve eluded camera traps, but forest rangers say they believe there are two tigers because of the distance between Garwha and Ranchi, which is almost three times the typical tiger range.

In places where big cats live in proximity to humans, especially farmers, the government pays compensation to the owners of livestock killed and eaten by the predators.

There’s also a separate, more controversial compensation program for the families of people killed by tigers. Recent court cases in the country have hinged on the cold calculations of attaching monetary value to human life, and whether families are owed compensation if their relatives knowingly entered tiger preserves.

For India, it’s part of a delicate balancing act between conserving the country’s national animal and one of nature’s most beloved species, and avoiding the ire of people who are impacted by their presence. When big cats prey on livestock, if the government does not address the situation, locals will eventually take matters into their own hands and try to kill the apex predators. That usually doesn’t work out well for either side.

On average, about 60 people are killed each year by tigers in India, according to government statistics. There’s been a sharp increase in victims in recent years, with tigers taking 110 human lives in 2022 and 83 in 2023, although it’s not yet clear why.

As for livestock, a 2018 study by wildlife biologists with the Corbett Foundation documented 8,365 reported instances of big cats killing cattle, buffalo and other animals between 2006 and 2015. That works out to about 830 per year, with tigers responsible for 570 livestock kills on average and leopards responsible for the rest.

To reduce the number of inter-species conflicts, the government of India has relocated thousands of families away from the country’s 27 tiger preserves in addition to compensating farmers for their losses.

Tiger sub — A tiger cub on a preserve in India. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

On a tangential note, this is another reason why the persistent claims of big cats stalking the British countryside strain credulity.

To paraphrase wildlife conservationist Egil Droge of the University of Oxford, when big cats live in an area, you know it because the signs are everywhere — massive and unmistakable pug marks (paw prints) on the ground, trees left with deep gauges by males marking their territory, and dung also serving as a territorial marker.

“I’ve worked with large carnivores in Africa since 2007 and it’s obvious if big cats are around. You would regularly come across prints of their paws along roads. The rasping sound of a leopard’s roar can be heard from several kilometres,” Droge wrote in a 2023 post about alleged big cat sightings in the UK.

Last but not least, big cats eat. A lot. A reliable supply of large prey animals is necessary to support even the smallest of breeding populations, and felids of all species are known to go for easy meals — in this case livestock — when the opportunity presents itself.

Still, the idea refuses to die, and there are still regular reports from people who have seen large cats and insist they’re not our domesticated friends.