Angry villagers beat tiger to death

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, authorities said 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-yearold 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, Srivastava said.

Several dozen men quickly formed a posse intent on killing the tiger, forestry officials said.