Indian police have shot dead a tiger nicknamed the “Man-Eater of Champaran” after it killed at least nine people in a massive operation involving 200 people, including elephant trackers, police said on Sunday.
The big cat has been terrorizing residents around the Valmiki Tiger Reserve in eastern India’s Champaran, killing at least six people, including a woman and her eight-year-old son, on Saturday.
Even before these last two deaths, officials believed the tiger was a three- or four-year-old male, thought to be a “man-eater,” meaning it could be put down.
Previous attempts to euthanize the animal have failed.
“On Saturday afternoon two teams on two elephants entered the forest and the third waited where we thought the tiger would come out and we fired. […] To kill him there,” local police chief Kiran Kumar told AFP.
Kumar said it took around six hours for a team of eight snipers and 200 forest personnel to complete the operation as the villagers destroyed the tin containers.
Conservationists blame the rapid expansion of human settlements around forests and major wildlife routes such as elephants and tigers for the rise in human-animal conflicts in parts of India.
About 225 people lost their lives in tiger attacks in India between 2014 and 2019, according to government statistics.
The statistics reveal that between 2012 and 2018, more than 200 tigers were killed by poachers or electrocuted.
About 70% of the world’s tigers reside in India, with 2,967 tigers in the country in 2018.
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