Your Royal Highness...I wish we could save you!

“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

~ William Blake

News : Two 17-month old tiger cubs were poisoned in Ranthambore tiger Reserve, India a few months back and now in Sariska Reserve. A tiger was killed in Assam some time back when it killed two people in nearby village.

“Contrary to what most people say, the most dangerous animal in the world is not the lion or the tiger or even the elephant. It’s a shark riding on an elephant’s back, just trampling and eating everything they see.” ~ Jack Handy

The main reason for killing has been poaching for a very long time. In fact, tiger skin can be arranged in as short as a week’s time in some markets in places like Bhutan or Tibet.  This can be curbed only when people would stop thinking of (dead)tigers as an object of decoration or fancy clothing. And no, tiger testicles are NOT going to make anyone more potent. Tiger bones are NOT going to cure you of some rare diseases, or even not-so-rare diseases. Education and sensitivity – both are seriously lacking in people.  And the government has been unable to stop this mostly because of lack of governance and administration coupled with a lack of serious effort from the common man.

“When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity. The distinction between crime and justice is no greater.” 

~ George Bernard Shaw

But then, it isn’t just poaching now. Tigers are now killed because they come in direct conflict with “man”. One should realise that a tiger is a territorial and solitary animal. Only when his territory is threatened & encroached upon and there is lack of food that he attacks anyone.

Suppose you let your cattle graze in forests or outskirts of forests (after having encroached a part of it and living there), why would the tiger decide to leave an easy meal and wait for a deer. I mean it takes substantial effort to make a kill. You can’t go to a tiger’s home and blame him for acting like a tiger!

In any case, the two tiger cubs in Ranthambore were poisoned this March. Goats were coated with poison and tied to a tree and the tiger cubs died after eating it. They were killed by villagers since the tigers had been attacking their livestock. At that time the officials lamented and said that had few tigers been relocated to Sariska, these cubs would have got more space and wouldn’t have strayed to the outskirts.

 And look what happened in November. The relocated, collared tiger was killed too and most probably, by villagers. A Revenge Kill! Tigers unlike lions are solitary creatures and hence do not live in groups. There is no one to protect the cub when the tigress goes hunting. They have high mortality rate and very few cubs survive till adulthood. In these circumstances, it is very disheartening to hear such news.

How do you protect India’s National Animal ???