Is a tigress lured by men’s deodorant? Can drones do what humans can’t? These questions don't interest Lakhpat Singh Rawat. The Uttarakhand hunter with 52 kills to his name always knew he was dealing with smart cats.
Asked about the man eating tigress of Yavatmal, Rawat said: “She won’t return. Now that she knows where to get easy prey, has a good cover to hide, it is almost impossible for her to leave the place, especially when she has two cubs to feed.”
About 1,500km from Uttarakhand, 250 forest personnel, five elephants, two dogs, two drones, a paraglider and a hunter have been waiting several days for the appearance of Avni, a six-year-old man eating tigress who is believed to have killed 13 humans in Yavatmal’s Pandharkawada. A tranquillise-or-kill order is out on her.
Rawat, 54, spoke from the experience of hunting a man-eating tigress in the sugarcane fields of Ramnagar, near the Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand.
“The one we killed in Ramnagar had grown up around those fields. That is why she returned,” Rawat said.
On September 6, 2016, the first kill was recorded against the three-year-old tigress — an old woman out to cut grass in the fields. Eleven days later, a man was killed.
Then some people were mauled and local anger rose. A demand to kill the tigress gained ground. Rawat reached Ramnagar on September 19. By then, the forest department had tried everything to capture her, using drones, a helicopter, two dogs and seven elephants.
They had put up 65 camera traps to track her. But the tigress proved to be smarter.
“Ek baar jis camera ke aage se nikal jati, dobara uske aage se nahin nikalti thi (if she walked past one trap camera, she would never cross it from the front again). The next time, she would cross from behind that camera. Believe it or not, she remembered all the 65 spots where the cameras had been installed. The day she was killed, a fresh camera had been put the previous night. She didn’t know the location of that camera,” Rawat said. It took the hunting party almost a month to outsmart the tigress.
The animal was surrounded by three elephants in a ditch. She was shot in the head and the body later paraded by local people.
The hunting team was amazed by her intelligence, Rawat recalled.
In his book, The Man-eating Leopard Of Rudraprayag, Jim Corbett had a lesson in caution: “A wrong estimation of the intelligence of animals and the inability to sit without making any sound or movement for the required length of time are the causes of all failures....”
Talking about the Yavatmal tigress, Rawat said: “In two years, imagine how clever this tigress must have become. She must have learnt a lot of things and she learnt it from them (the hunters). The tigress lives near the village, she’s given birth to cubs in that area, she knows the lay of the land and places that provide cover. Ab woh thodi na chhodegi us area ko (she won’t leave that area now),” Rawat said. “The more these hunters act clever, the more clever she will become. She will observe and learn.”
On September 27, Lakhpat Singh Rawat shot a 14-year-old male leopard which had mauled 10 women in Someshwar, which is in Uttarakhand’s Almora district. The old animal, unable to hunt, was attacking people in the daytime and was declared a man eater as a precaution. He was Rawat’s 51st kill. Courtesy: Lakhpat Singh Rawat
Rawat’s initiation into hunting man eating tigers and leopards --- two tigers and 50 leopards --- was unusual.
He is a government schoolteacher in Uttarakhand’s Gairsain and kills man eaters for free when called by forest officials to help. A leopard killed 11 children of his school over three years in that area. “I had done a Staff Selection Commission training in 1984 and knew how to handle a rifle. So I asked the officials to give me a permit (to kill the leopard),” Rawat said. “After a lot of pressure from the community, they issued me a permit. It took me eight months to kill that leopard, by that time it had killed another child and an old woman.”
The district magistrate gave Rawat a licence for a .315 bore rifle. The National Tiger Conservation Authority’s guidelines recommends elimination by a 'firearm with the appropriate bore size (not below .375 magnum)'.
“Tigers are bold and leopards are cunning,” said Sanjay Singh, a hunter from Moradabad, explaining why people fear a tiger more. “Leopards look after their own safety first and go for easy prey such as children or dogs. Tigers don’t care.”
Tranquillising a man eater, whether a leopard or a tiger, is tricky. A tranquilliser gun’s range requires a shooter to be 30-50 metres from the animal to get a good shot. “There aren’t trained shooters in our forest departments who can handle a tranquilliser gun, an equipment which isn’t available in most forest areas,” Singh said.
Singh carries two guns, a 12-bore shotgun if the animal is too close to him, and a .315 rifle to shoot from a distance.
Darts are another issue. As the darts are not GPS-enabled, it is difficult to find the animal once its shot at. “In this hilly area, it will take a leopard 10 minutes to cross 3-4 km. Where will you go looking for it then?” Rawat asked.
In Yavatmal’s Pandharkawada, the authorities are mulling what could be the next step. Their attempts to find the tigress using drones, a paraglider or Cane Corso dogs have not shown results. They even thought of using a perfume, Calvin Klein Obsession for Men. A study had reported that the scent attract bigs cats as studied on a leopard in the Bronx zoo in New York.
“Bahot tough hoga, sir, bahot tough (it’ll be very tough, sir, very tough),” Rawat repeated. “They shouldn’t underestimate her intelligence.”
Joy Hukil, a hunter from Pauri in Uttarakhand, was there tracking the Ramnagar tigress. “When humans stop being a threat and turn into their prey, they (tigers and leopards) stay alert and observe human activities. That is what Avni is doing,' Hukil said. He has 31 kills to his name, one of these a tiger.
'Itni bheed-bhaad mein shikaar hota bhi nahin (hunting can’t happen in chaos),' he said. 'It took us more than a month to track the Ramnagar tigress because hundreds were looking for her. If 400 people start looking for a tigress, how can you expect her to come out? She must be trying to save her cubs and would have gone into hiding.'