CHAMPAWAT AND THE CHALLENGE OF HUMAN-WILDLIFE CONFLICT
Tigers are among Earth’s most efficient hunters, able to bring down everything from crocodiles to Asian elephants. From an ecological standpoint, they regulate herbivore populations, allowing grasslands and forests to grow optimally. As tiger habitats were cleared from the 1800s onwards, however, their prey disappeared, forcing many animals to resort to desperate measures to survive. Since then, some tigers began to hunt humans, terrifying thousands of people, particularly in population-dense India where the largest number of wild tigers thrive. Feared above all was the legendary giant tigress, Champawat. From 1903 to 1907, she killed 436 people in India and Nepal before eventually being put down by conservationist Jim Corbett, who theorized that “circumstances beyond her control forced Champawat to adopt a completely alien diet.” Corbett was right, as the tiger was found to have broken teeth caused by an earlier gunshot wound – leaving her unable to hunt her usual prey.
In fear and reprisal for human and livestock attacks, people killed tigers by the thousands, with a tigress being clubbed and run over with a tractor in India as recently as November 2018. Because of this, four of the nine tiger subspecies -- Bali, Caspian, Javan and Sumatran tigers -- are now extinct.
To reduce human-wildlife conflict, tiger territories must be closed off to humans and a system for transferring overly-aggressive animals to more remote locations must be enforced. Still, wildlife conservationists acknowledge the difficulties of managing one of the world’s most efficient predators, especially in highlypopulated rural areas. It’s an equation no one has been able to solve yet.