Bengal Post, 1 September, 2010
Do I agree that all tigers in Sunderbans are maneaters? That was the angry question hurled at me over phone last evening by a wildlife enthusiast who runs an NGO in Kolkata. I was stumped. Could I answer such a question? Was not it like asking if (all) Indians are corrupt? Or (all) cricketers greedy?
When I pointed out my problem with the question, I was told, more angrily, that anyone who knew Sunderbans would agree that the tigers there were all maneaters. Did not I know how many hundreds were killed by tigers historically in this mangrove delta? Or that even the watchtowers were secured with tough fencing? Would I dare take a walk along one of those creeks?
I humbly pointed out that if we were to believe in anecdotal records, thousands of people had died of tiger attacks all over India in the past and such figures did not necessarily single out Sunderbans tigers for their maneating propensity. I added that if I found a dog confined behind a bolted door at a friend’s house, I would rather attribute the unusual move to the host’s concern for my safety than to the animal’s obvious ferocity. And I really might not walk the Sunderbans forests partially because I fear encountering a problem tiger disturbed by the practice of frequent capture-release and partially because mangroves do not offer a particularly pleasant walking experience.
At that point, the wildlife enthusiast hung up on me. But what triggered this angry call got me thinking. Dr Monirul Khan, a tiger expert from Bangladesh, was in Kolkata to attend a tiger meet last week and he was quoted in the media, saying he thought one out of every ten tigers in Sunderbans were maneaters. No, he did not furnish any proof. I expressed my reservations to such regressive fear-mongering and a mini-hell broke loose.
Even before I received this angry call, some friends from Kolakata pointed out Dr Khan’s “excellent credentials”, daring me to doubt his maneater theory. To be honest, all I knew about Dr Khan until last week was that he pioneered a model that used dogs to ward off tigers. The effort was documented by none less than a BBC crew. Not much has been heard of it since.
Then, I stumbled upon Dr Khan’s paper on the dog experiment. He said use of domestic dogs to ward off animals was not a new idea and gave three examples. His first example – driving wild boars into forests in some areas in the US – is not relevant since wild boars do not usually eat dogs. Then he mentioned how Jim Corbett’s dog Robin used to track leopards for him, and how trained dogs were used to locate individual tigers in the Russian Far East. So dogs can surely get you to a big cat. But what about getting away?
Dr Khan claimed dogs were trained to alert wood gatherers or honey hunters of tiger presence nearby and that the “success rate in distinguishing the tiger was 62 per cent”. If I were to trust my life on a dog, I would prefer him to be slightly more accurate. Moreover, how was this success rate determined? Well, “either immediately, by observing the animals or their signs, or the next day (to avoid the risk of encountering any tiger) by observing pugmarks or scat.” Next day, did he say? I guess wild animals were expected to be cooperative enough and not trample upon those sites till researchers returned 24 hours later.
But there is more. Dr Khan assumes that tigers prefer humans to dogs and this makes the dogs on duty safe. Again, by his own admission, tigers attack people in Sunderbans only when they enter the forest and not in villages. But there are records of tigers picking up village dogs. The last recorded instance in Sunderbans was in November last year when a dog was killed in Gosaba's Pirkhali village.
So, tigers do hunt dogs. Now if a dog barks inside a forest at the sight of a deer or a boar, there is a high probability of a tiger picking up the noise from half a kilometer away. So far from alerting people, the presence of a dog inside forests may actually attract predators and endanger people accompanying it.
On the maneating debate, let us assume that all Sunderbans tigers consider humans as food. A tiger makes roughly 50 kills a year to survive. Sunderbans’ 300 tigers would make at least 15,000 kills every year. If humans are part of the normal prey base for Sunderbans tigers, and since humans are easier to hunt, one would expect a sizable number of these 15,000 kills to be humans. Even at 10 per cent, we are looking at a human casualty figure of 1,500 per year. However, the total annual human death toll across Sunderbans barely ever touches 100. The figures just do not add up.
In fact, between 1984 and 2006, tigers killed 490 people in Bangladesh -- at an annual average of 21. In the same period, data shows that of all the Sunderbans tigers that killed people, about 50 per cent killed only one person each, implying these were accidental attacks. Still we go on making casual remarks on how the love for human flesh is getting embedded in the Sunderban tiger’s gene. No scientist will even dignify such claims with a response.
So, do I believe all tigers in Sunderbans are maneaters? Frankly, I do not know. These mangrove tigers do kill humans opportunistically. But very little ground research has been conducted in this hostile terrain for anyone to reach a conclusion yet. Fortunately, a few very able scientists are at work on both sides of the border and their findings will hopefully throw some light on the behaviour of these much-misunderstood tigers in the near future. Till then, we better hold on to our pet theories. Let’s not play blind men around a tiger.
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