KILLER TIGER STRIKES FEAR IN FARMHANDS
Workers witnessing latest prowler afraid to enter the sugarcane fields where they earn their living
MANIWALA, India — She lies in wait while her victims are collecting firewood, or taking cattle to graze, or working in the fields. She has grabbed people in broad daylight, carrying them away silently into the forests or the sugarcane fields. By the time the victims are found, often little is left but a pair of shoes, unspeakable gore and drying blood.
Over seven weeks she has travelled, almost completely unseen, for more than 190 kilometres. She has crossed villages, small towns and at least one highway.
A killer is stalking the villages of north India. She has killed at least nine people, all of them poor villagers living on the fringes of one of the world’s last wild tiger habitats. They are people who cannot afford a day off work, people who have no indoor plumbing and must use the fields as their toilets. They are people who know little about India’s recent successes in tiger conservation.
But with the sudden appearance of one tiger, they look at an animal so beloved to outsiders and see only a monster. “She has turned into a maneater,” said Vijay Pal Singh, whose neighbour, a 22- year- old farm labourer named Shiv Kumar Singh, was killed as he worked at the edge of a sugarcane field in January. In an area where
The time for tranquilizing is over; the time for caging is over.
SAMAR JEET SINGH
HUNTER
nearly everyone works outside, this means life has been completely upended. “People are afraid to go into the fields,” Singh said.
While hunters are brought in to kill man- eating tigers every year or so in India, it has been decades since a tiger killed as many people as this one, or stayed on the run so long.
“She won’t stop now. She’ll keep killing,” said Samar Jeet Singh, a hunter with an aristocratic pedigree, a curled- up moustache and a high- powered heirloom rifle. For almost a month, he has been tracking the female tiger, most recently through the forests and dried riverbeds near where she made her last kill, cutting down an elderly buffalo herder last week. Searchers found just part of one arm and one leg.
When he finds her, he said, he will shoot her dead. “The time for tranquilizing is over; the time for caging is over,” he said.
For generations, few in these villages even thought about tigers. The encroachment of towns, widespread poaching and incompetent wildlife programs had devastated India’s tiger populations, forcing them into smaller enclaves. Corbett National Park, one of India’s premier tiger reserves, is barely 40 kilometres away, but while the villagers around here are used to living with wildlife — the forests and fields shelter leopards, monkeys, foxes, bears and wild boars — tigers were extremely rare.
The last decade, though, has seen improvements in tiger conservation and growth in the tiger populations. “This area is so rich in wildlife,” said Vijay Singh, a top regional forestry official in the nearby town of Bijnor ( and who, like so many people in this region, has the last name Singh). “That is the problem.”
The problem is magnified by the choice of crops. Sugarcane is the backbone of the local economy, and thousands of cane fields, with their dense stands of three- metre- tall plants, offer ideal hiding places.
Wildlife experts know little about the tiger they are hunting other than it is a female because of the shape of its paw prints. Many believe it is somehow injured, which could explain why it overcame its natural fear of humans. Some believe the tiger now prefers to eat human flesh. “It is because of taste that she is killing now — because of taste only,” said Singh, the forestry official.