Tigers are on the whole very good tempered

On the whole, tigers are well tempered creatures disinterested in attacking people. They prefer to avoid humans and normally give them a wide berth. Even if they are provoked they will growl back and if provoked further they may rush at the person combined with a loud roar but they will not attack. Their intention is to avoid attack and to see the person off. Occasionally a tiger may object to a person approaching too closely to her cubs or to their kill that they are guarding. But one of the great so-called big-game hunters of that era, Jim Corbett, said that if a person is attacked by a tiger the blame rests with the intruder.

Champawat tiger. Image in public domain due to lapse of time.

It is said that if tigers and lions which attack people in an unprovoked manner it is possibly or probably due to the fact that the tiger is injured and unable to successfully bring down a typical prey animal. They therefore have to resort to much easier prey i.e. the human. This topic is relevant today because India has a new man-eating tiger near the village of Khambada which in turn is near the Taboda National Park where there are 175 tigers (estimated). This is in the huge district of Chandrapur.

The tiger who has decided to eat people is male and eight years old. His name is Rajuri Tiger One (RT1). He's been known for a while and has mauled eight people to death and injured three others including his first who was a woman named Varsha Todse. The locals are panicked and are in their own mini-lockdown. They want the tiger found and shot dead whereas the authorities want to track down the tiger and tranquillize it to presumably remove him from the district. They may check him out health-wise to see whether his attacks on people is due to poor health.

It is said that human settlements and businesses encroaching on the park increases the possibility of conflict with the tiger. You have to factor in the massive increase in the population of people in India from around 280 million in 1900 to around 1.4 billion in 2020. This must impact the number of human-tiger conflicts. India is a very big country but eventually there won't be enough space for people and tigers to live in harmony. That situation may have been reached already. There are reserves in tiger but they're not fenced in for obvious reasons; they are far too large. Therefore people can come and go into and out of them. They'll be hotels or other facilities near the edges of tiger reserves to accommodate tourists. Farmers sometimes work in reserves.

In some reserves there are no tigers or so few that you can never see them. It is said, however, that the tiger population in India has increased from 1400 approximately two about 3000 today. This may be due to a different method of measuring tiger numbers. Counting tigers is very difficult and I don't think you can rely on these figures as the gospel truth.

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