The “man-eater” of the Valmiki Tiger Reserve (VTR) in Bihar was shot dead in a seven-hour joint operation by police and forest department officials from the state and Nepal on Saturday, hours after it killed two more people and took its victim tally to 10.
“The tiger was eliminated by a team of shooters from the Bihar police. Our officials assisted them. A team of forest officials from Nepal helped cordon off the area where it was hiding. The tiger was hit by three bullets and its death was instantaneous,” Bihar additional principal chief conservator of forests-cum-wild life warden Prabhat Kumar Gupta told The Telegraph.
He said the body had been recovered from the sugarcane field in West Champaran district where the tiger was shot and sent for a physical examination and post-mortem to find out why the three-year-old male codenamed T104 and identified as Cub 1 of T34 tigress of VTR had become a man-eater.
The operation on elephant back to put down the tiger. Sanjay Choudhary
“Normally, tigers do not become man-eaters at such a young age. We need to find out what happened that it started hunting humans. It will then be cremated according to the standard operating procedure for Schedule-I animals under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. It has to be destroyed so that nobody can keep any of its body parts as trophy,” Gupta said.
Forest officials said the dead tiger’s identity was established on the basis of its stripes, pugmarks and other traits. It had been straddling the southern fringe area of the VTR and the vast sugarcane fields of Harnatand, Chiutaha, Raghia and Goberdhana that have numerous villages and a high density of human population.
Earlier on Saturday, the man-eater killed two women at Balua village. It had entered a sugarcane field that had 8-10ft-high standing crops after villagers raised an alarm. Its pugmarks showed that it had not exited the field.
Soon a cordon was set up in the area, nets were placed and the team of shooters and forest officials entered the field on the backs of elephants. The operation lasted around seven hours.
A large number of villagers gathered to take a look at the dead tiger that had struck terror in the area for the past couple of months.
“Thousands of people have gathered here. They are not budging. We are trying hard to control them and take the tiger’s carcass for a post-mortem,” VTR director-cum-conservator of forest Nesamani K. told The Telegraph over phone. The body was later taken away on a tractor.
This is the first time a tiger in Bihar was declared a man-eater and put down.
