Man-eater tigress killed after 44-day hunt
HALDWANI: Aman-eatertigressthat had terrorised people across a vast swathe of Uttarakhand’s Nainital district was shot dead on Thursday after a 44-day search, involving several hunters and hundreds of forest department workers, besides a helicopter and drones.
Forest department officials said the tigress, blamed for two human deaths, was shot dead at a village around 250km from Dehradun, where it was hiding in a sugarcane field and nursing bullet wounds she suffered on Wednesday during a failed bid to kill it.
Said to be one of the biggest such operations in the state, the governmentspentabout₹75lakhtokillthe tigress that had become a political issue in poll-bound Uttarakhand. The BJP had accused the Congress government of not doing enough to solve the people’s problems. As villagers and the forest department rejoiced at the killing of the predator, experts warned that eliminating one man-eater was unlikely to solve the problem of the state battling growing man-animal conflict.
Officials said the big cat, nicknamed the ‘sugarcane tigress’, was around five to six years old.
On Wednesday evening, hunters fired at least 15 rounds in the same area but it managed to escape. One of thehunters,JoyHukil,saidone bullet had hit the big cat. After forest department teams spotted blood trails on sugarcane leaves, a search operation was launched at night. However, the tigress continued to elude the hunters.
On Thursday afternoon, the tigress was finally killed after it was spotted by hunting dogs, officials said. “The people of the area will feel safe now,” said Parag Madhukar Dhakate, the western division conservator of forests.
Qamar Qureshi, senior tiger expert at the Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India, defended the killing of the tigress. “It’s important to conserve the species but, at the same time, we cannot risk the life of people to safeguard one animal,” he said.