A member of the Karnataka State Wildlife Board has said the recent killing of a tiger in the forests near Belagavi should be a lesson at least for the future so that there would be more coordination among wildlife biologists, government institutions and the common man.
In a letter to Minister for Forests, Environment and Ecology, B. Ramanath Rai, board member Surya N.R. Addoor said the poor tiger, which was relocated from Chikkamagaluru forests, did not get its natural right to live despite the fact that the tiger was not responsible for the plight into which it was driven. “What really amazed me (with due respect to bereaved families) is the amount of man-force involved in the whole operation,” he said.
Mr. Surya said the incident had proved that the humans were deviating from the rules of nature. Despite the availability of modern gadgets, the tiger was not treated properly. There is a marked difference between the physiography of Chikkamagaluru forests and Belagavi forests, located hundreds of kilometres away. It is not clear whether any estimates were made about availability of prey species for the tiger in Belagavi forests before its release.
While round-the-clock monitoring of a predatory animal should be done after the relocation, it was not done in the Belagavi incident. The tiger was made to suffer due to crowding in the new habitat with other predators. The tiger, released in Belagavi on November 19, took almost one month to attack a human being: which showed it was not a man-eater.
Mr. Surya said while thousands of people got killed in road accidents, people neither stopped using vehicles nor abandoned the vehicle that killed people. Even people involved in killing would be freed for lack of evidence. “However, when it comes to a wild animal and the error that it may make, we make a hue and cry and demand its extinction for no fault of it,” he regretted.
