Dead or alive, hunt for man-eating tiger won't end well for conservationist

[Zarvan]

At left, a man sets off a homemade contraption that uses gunpowder to make a loud noise and scare off any nearby predators. People believe a tiger has killed at least 10 people since late December in two northern Indian states.







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In India, the hunt for a deadly tiger

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Leopard suspected of eating 15 people in Nepal

Man vs. beast

In Tanda Sahuwala, Singh and other men from the village have taken things into their own hands. They've tied a calf to a tree in the very spot where the tiger killed Lal Singh. It's bait.

They believe the tiger will return to the place where she was successful in her hunt. They believe the calf will lure her when she is hungry and tired. And when she is back, the villagers will be ready. A man sits on a bamboo perch in a nearby tree. He is armed with a gun.

It is midafternoon and silence falls in the middle of this jungle. The only sounds are the sporadic rustle of branches in the light breeze and the chained calf's losing struggle to free itself. The sight of the stressed animal makes everyone uneasy.

"I think it's time for us to go," Khan says. "We have been here way too long."

When a tiger turns into a man-eater, it becomes faster and shrewder, Khan says. A normal tiger would change its course at the hint of people nearby and lose itself in the jungle. A man-eater does the opposite: It uses its uncanny sense of smell and sight to move toward people.

Suddenly, the trek back to the car, only about a third of a mile, seems unending, all eyes focused on the thick vegetation on both sides of the dirt path.

On the car ride back to the outpost, where the elephants are groomed, it becomes evident how tigers have become so threatened.

The sugarcane fields are perhaps the most blatant sign of human encroachment into tiger territory. As people have cleared forest lands to grow crops, tigers have run out of natural habitats and resources, says D.S. Chauhan, project leader for the Wildlife Trust of India.

In India, tigers have only 11% of their original habitats left. They are dependent now on conservation, according to the international wildlife charity Born Free. It's on the reserves where they find needed contiguous forests with access to prey and water and undisturbed areas for breeding.

In natural habitats like this part of Uttar Pradesh, preserving lands for tigers is up against the needs of desperately poor people, who are spilling onto more and more land for farming and livestock and depleting tiger territory of land and prey.

"It's all about hunger," Khan explains. "People encroached on grasslands forcing small animals to move into the fields near villages. That forces tigers to pursue them."

Queen of the jungle

Tarabati, a woman in the village of Maniawala, does not understand the problems posed by human encroachment. She just wants the tiger dead.

On January 10, her 22-year-old son Shiv Kumar was coming down a poplar tree he was pruning when the tiger leaped from an adjacent sugarcane field and snapped his neck from behind. The tiger then dragged his body several hundred feet. There might have been nothing left of Shiv Kumar except that villagers arrived on the scene and scared the tiger away.

Tarabati says she fainted when she saw her son's body before the cremation.

She pulls out a passport-size color snapshot of her son that she keeps tucked in her blouse, as though to make sure everyone knows what he looked like before the mauling. He was so handsome, she says. He was the breadwinner for the family. Her daughter Pushpa will have to wait now to get married. The family has no money. Will no one compensate them for their loss?

"A tiger's life is worth so much," she says. "But human beings? We get nothing."

Khan listens to the grieving mother. There is nothing he can say to appease the immense hatred she feels toward the one animal he has dedicated his life to save.

As a conservationist, this is the most difficult challenge he's had to face so far. With each day, he grows more anxious about the ending to this story. But he refuses to give up.

So when the sun rises again, he will put on his ankle-high boots and safari hat, climb on top of an elephant and again go deep into the bowels of a north Indian forest, looking for a queen.

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CNN's Harmeet Shah Singh contributed to this story.
Man-eating tiger on the prowl in India - CNN.com