The Tiger

It may surprise people to know that one of the world's great white hunters turned tiger conservation specialist, Jim Corbett, after which a tiger reserve has been named, said that, "Tigers, except when wounded or when man-eaters, are on the whole very good-tempered. Occasionally a tiger will object to too close an approach to its cubs or to a kill that it is guarding. The objection invariably takes the form of growling, and if this does not prove effective it is followed by short rushes accompanied by terrifying roars. If these warnings are disregarded, the blame for any injury inflicted rests with the intruder." Image in the public domain. The healthy tiger is a reluctant attacker of people. It wants to avoid people. They have the ability to kill people quite easily but the surprise to many is that they rarely do so. Radio collared tigers had been found about 10 m from a trail were hundreds of people walk. They have been seen next to a river in which tourist boats pass w...

Well, today, we can answer the question in the title with a certain amount of accuracy because the World Wildlife Fund for Nature has recently reported that they have recorded 3,167 tigers in India which is more than double the 1,411 recorded when the census began in 2006. Camera trap counts a tiger. 7-Tiger CT_©Ullas Karanth-WCS This information is fresh in news media today and I am looking at a report in The Times dated Tuesday, April 11, 2023. They used cameras traps which made the recording of tiger numbers more accurate. In the past they used scats i.e. faeces and pug marks (paw prints) to count tigers or estimate their numbers. They know the tigers' habitats. They place 32,500 cameras in these habitats mounted on trees or posts. They take millions of photographs automatically because they are motion sensor activated. The cameras are set up in pairs which allows them to capture both sides of each tiger and record the stripes which are unique like a human fingerprint. In this w...

NEWS AND COMMENT: Atkosia Tiger Reserve is located in the Angul district of Odisha, India covering an area of 988.30 km². A plan to repopulate the reserve with tigers has failed miserably with a catalogue of disasters. Sad failure in tiger conservation in India. Photo: The Hindu file photo. A tigress imported into the reserve (one of a pair) has been removed from the reserve to be returned to Madhya Pradesh. The tigress's name is Sundari. The tiger was kept in a special enclosure inside the Satkosia Forest before removal. A final act of failure. Before the return of Sundari it was claimed that the reserve had abundant prey and the management had asked for fresh tigers.  In the first year of the repopulation a tiger was gifted from Kanha and a tigress from the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve.  The tigress strayed into a human settlement surrounding the reserve and killed two people. And then, in Nov 2018, the first tiger was killed by poachers. Comment : poaching of Bengal tigers ...

A swath of officials in the Indian city of Raipur, Chhattisgarh have been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the illegal tiger trade and there appears to be evidence that villagers have been eating tiger body parts.  Bengal tiger for illustration purposes only. Photo in public domain. Eating tiger body parts almost exclusively occurs in the Far East of Asia e.g. in Vietnam, China and Laos. This is the first time to my knowledge that Indians in India have been involved in this conservation-busting practice. It must have happened before, however. Two assistant sub-inspectors of police, five constables, three health department officials and a school headmaster are among those arrested for being involved in the illegal trade of a tiger hide. They caught them through a decoy operation on March 12th. It is reported that two local residents have confessed to the police that they killed the tiger accidentally. They wanted to trap wild pigs in the Bacheli forest range. A tiger wa...

There was a time when tigers were considered pests. The time was towards the middle of the eighteenth century. That's the middle of the 1700s for the sake of clarity. The fact of the matter is that many people today still consider the tiger to be a pest.  Tigers can still get in the way of day-to-day human life (the conflict in the Sundarbans region in Bangladesh being an example). Perhaps this is one reason why, despite an apparent concerted effort to protect the tiger, their numbers are still slowly declining and are precariously low (around 3.5k worldwide in the wild). Tiger hunting during the British Raj in India. Photo in the publis domain. A man called J. Forsyth wrote about the 'obstacle presented by the number of these animals [he was referring to tigers] to the advance of population and tillage'. It is old fashioned language meaning that tigers stopped the human population growing and stopped people working. His words were published in 1872 in his work The Highl...

When you use Google to search for the answer to the question, "Who shot the most tigers?" you are presented with the answer to a question about which tiger killed the most people. So much for Google search. I have told Google about this error. Picture in the public domain. My reference book, Wild Cats Of The World , might not tell me who shot the most tigers but it does tell me who shot a hell of a lot of tigers and it may be the answer I am seeking. There was a time when tigers were regarded as pests in India. I am referring to the Bengal tiger because that is the species of tiger which resides in India. And when they became pests because they interfered with people and the commercialisation of the landscape in India they were open to being shot as a popular pastime with army officers. Don't forget this was the time of the British Raj, the British Empire, which is in fact back in the news today because a lot of people consider the British Empire as a bad project where...

For the past 20 years humankind has known that it has to protect the tiger because the animal is too iconic. It is the most outstanding and high profile wild species on the planet. The dichotomy arrives because the tiger interferes with the innate desire of humans to multiply their numbers, to grow their economy, to pursue their self-interest and to survive. Which objective is the more powerful? Tiger hunting by Col William Rice 1850 in India. Image in public domain. If we turn the clock back to India, where the tiger primarily lives, to 1850, an officer in the army, Col William Rice, shot 158 tigers between 1850 and 1854. Another officer, Col Gordon-Cumming shot 73 tigers in one district over two years. At this time tigers were seen as pests. They got in the way of village life and were seen as evil, destructive and treacherous. Killing them in large numbers was acceptable and indeed necessary. They discovered that it was harder and harder to find and shoot them. Ver...