The hunt is on for the man eater of Maharashtra

PANDHARKAWADA: The first victim was an older woman, discovered facedown in a cotton field with huge claw marks dug into her back. The next was an older male farmer, his left leg torn off. The killings have gone on for more than two years, sowing panic in the hills around Pandharkawada, a town in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal district. In mid-August, the mauled body of Vaghuji Kanadhari Raut, a threadbare cattle herder, was found near a rural highway. He was victim No. 12. DNA tests, camera traps, numerous spottings and pugmarks have pinned at least 13 human killings on a single, 5-year-old female tiger that seems to have developed a taste for human flesh and has evaded capture several times. At night, young men in the nearby villages carry torches and bamboo sticks and go on patrol. They have roughed up forest guards, furious that authorities can’t stop the killings. Experts say it’s extremely unusual for a single tiger to have attacked this many people. Some reports suggest that a male tiger is also moving around the same territory and could be responsible for a share of the killings. Forest rangers are now gearing up for a complex military-style operation to deploy sharpshooters with tranquilizer guns on the backs of half a dozen elephants to surround the tiger, capture her and send her to a zoo. As the death count rises — three villagers were killed in August — several politicians are demanding that the rangers simply shoot the tiger. But that might not be legal, and the matter is now in the Supreme Court in the form a mercy petition for the tigress — named T1 — filed by wildlife activists Ajay Dubey of the NGO Prayatna, Bhopal, and Simarat Sandhu of Save Tiger Campaign, Delhi. Meantime, rangers have been posted on rickety wooden stands built into jungle trees, ordered to keep their eyes peeled for the tiger. But they don’t even have binoculars.

“I don’t want to kill this beautiful animal,” said K M Abharna, a top forestry official in Pandharkawada, which lies near the borders of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. “But there’s a hell of a lot of political pressure and a hell of a lot of public pressure.” In several tiger areas, more prey now lives outside the dedicated reserve than inside. That may be luring tigers out. “As soon as the tiger comes out, he sees a lot of cattle,” explained Bilal Habib, an ecology professor and tiger researcher. So the tiger decides to stick around, Bilal said, catalysing a whole cycle of conflict and death. In the case of T1, researchers are at a loss to explain why she started attacking humans. She has also killed some cows and horses. The rangers have been keeping track of her since she was a cub; when she was young, they say, her mother was electrocuted. This is another growing problem, as farmers all over India string up crude electric fences to keep wild pigs out of their crops. Her first victims were farmers weeding their fields at the forest’s edge. According to charts forestry officials have been keeping, T1 has eaten the flesh of about half of her victims. She gnawed off one woman’s legs at the knees almost like a chain saw. She chewed into one man’s back, leaving his spinal column exposed.

The rangers took swabs of tiger saliva from the wounds and sent them to labs for DNA analysis. Over several months, as the results came in, they began to piece together what they were facing. In January, forestry officials applied for what is called a shoot order, but a Mumbai-based activist succeeded in blocking the move. Then, T1 gave birth to two fuzzy cubs, which meant any action against her could jeopardise them, too. So the rangers equipped themselves with nets and tranquilizer guns and fanned out into the jungles, full of pungent bushes, old gnarled teak trees and clouds of dragonflies hovering in the thick, humid air. Four times, they tried to capture T1. “But she’s very wild,” said Abharna, the forestry official. “And she’s very clever.” Each time, she either hid in the tangle of the bushes or raced away. As the forestry officials wrestle over what to do, activists keep returning to court to block shoot orders. They say the tiger is simply defending her cubs, and that the victims ventured into her territory. They are trying to compel the forestry department to tranquilize T1 and move her to another area. Meanwhile, the elephants, which rangers say are better for such an operation than any four-wheel-drive truck, are expected to arrive any day. The people living near Pandharkawada are losing patience. And they are becoming increasingly terrified.

“Just kill it,” said Rashika Vishal, the daughter of the herder who was mauled by the highway. “There’s nothing beautiful about this animal. It ate my father and we need to kill it before it kills someone else.” As she spoke, tears in her eyes, a dozen other people crowded into the family’s dark little shack and nodded vigorously in agreement. Tiger attacks, they said, were never an issue in the past. “When I was a kid, we used to walk around the jungle at night, no problem,” said C S Meshram, a village elder. “I don’t know where these tigers are coming from. But they keep coming.”