From November 2017 to August 2018, the tigress has killed 39 animals. But for reasons best known to the villagers of Borobazar, she still roams, unscathed and free.
When the tigress made her first kill — a cow, bound near the yard of one Forhan Daimari — the villagers of Borobazar in Kalaigaon in Assam’s Udalguri district were not particularly alarmed. A wandering tiger in this particular vicinity, located as it is so close to the Orang National Park, is a guest who usually doesn’t overstay its welcome. Or so they thought. Over the course of that November, apart from partaking of Daimari’s cow, the tiger made seven more kills: four pigs, two cows, and a goat. And then the hamlet of Borobazar began to panic.
By day, they kept a watchful eye over their cattle which nervously grazed on a stretch of forest grassland, near which the tiger was perhaps lurking. By evening, they may well have imagined a pair of red eyes and shadowy shape skulking around Borobazar twilight roads. Come night and they were too scared to sleep. “As soon as it got dark, we would be back inside our huts. No ‘up and down’ in the streets. No going out, not even to pee,” says Marnek Daimari, a villager. Two weeks back, close to a year after the tigress first strayed into their village, Daimari lost his lone cow to the apex predator.
From November 2017 to August 2018, the tigress has killed 39 animals. But for reasons best known to the villagers of Borobazar, she still roams, unscathed and free. If this was a regular man-animal conflict story, the tigress would have met her fate long back. Like, the other Royal Bengal tigress who had wandered into the midst of Borobazar in January 2016. A week later, she was found poisoned and dead. “No one in the village likes to acknowledge that incident — to kill a tiger is a sin, and they very well know that,” says Dipen Boro, the vice-president of the Assam Bodo Students Union (ABSU). The organisation, active in the Bodo Territorial Autonomous Districts, has been holding awareness camps and meetings to sensitise villagers about social issues, including wildlife conservation for years now. “To kill a tiger is not a difficult job. And yet, Borobazar has showed amazing tenacity in the past year — they have dealt with crops being ruined, animals being stolen and killed, and practically tip-toed around in their own home,” says Boro.
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Contrary to popular belief, tigers living alongside men isn’t an unusual phenomenon in India. According Janaki Lenin, Tamil Nadu -based wildlife writer, “There are large wild animals living across India outside of protected areas. We just don’t know about it. In Gujarat, there are people living with crocodiles in their backyard; in Karnataka, with king cobras in their gardens. And even tigers, in Bhopal, Indore and Dudhwa,” she says, adding: “It is hard to say why people are tolerant. Very often, it is religion. Very often, it is tradition too. But sometimes it is a change in attitude.”
This article was originally published in The Indian Express in August 2018. Full article here.