White mask on bull scares attacking tiger

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This is a video taken from what appears to be a bus or some other tourist vehicle in India. A bull is trotting down the road in a rainstorm towards the vehicle. The tiger is about 20 yards off the road to the left. 

The tiger sees the bull and goes in to attack it. The bull in showing courage confronts the tiger at speed. The tiger backs off and the bull carries on its way. 

This looks unusual because we are told countless times that tigers can pull down a cow fairly easily but there is something a bit different about this bull! It is wearing a mask. And the mask is white. 

Image: MikeB

Perhaps it was used in some sort of ceremony and I wonder whether the tiger became concerned because they could not recognise what would be for them a typical prey animal. Perhaps the tiger decided that he had not seen this kind of prey animal before and then decided that it might be dangerous and so backed off. That is my assessment of why this happened.

The video quality is poor but the content is interesting. The question that remains is whether bulls can kill tigers from time to time without wearing a white mask! And certainly, large ungulates can kill tigers or lions. They can be quite dangerous although this particular bull is fairly small.

If you do an Internet search for "cow kills tiger", Google shows articles on tigers killing cows! It just does not compute the possibility that a cow can kill an adult tiger. And perhaps that is true which makes me all the surer that the white mask on this cow tricked the tiger into backing off and running away.

Interestingly it has been found that human face masks attached to the back of the head of farmers in the Bangladesh Sundarbans deters tigers from attacking.

The video comes from the Twitter page of Indian Forest Services employee: 

Susanta Nanda IFS
Location: India

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