DNA Edit: The Terminator – The forest department was slow to act on T-1

The fate of tigress T-1, the mother of two cubs, now rests with Maharashtra government’s forest department, which will decide whether to sedate or shoot the man-eater. T-1 has gone rogue, so to speak. She and her cubs have killed nine people and eaten most of a corpse. Such behaviour makes her extremely dangerous for the villagers near the Ralegaon forests. No one knows why T-1 turned into a man-eater. But the series of attacks indicates she is targeting humans. T-1 is only six years old and, in the life of a wild cat, that’s youth. So, it is definitely not a case of old age prompting her to look for easy prey. To put things in perspective, the forest department is partly to blame for allowing the tiger crisis to get aggravated to this point. The department should have begun monitoring her movements when the tigress first struck. In this day and age, cutting-edge surveillance equipment would have made this job easy. 

Now the real challenge is to capture T-1. Tigers are extremely shy by nature and if T-1 gets a whiff of the fact that she’s being hunted, she would become extremely elusive. This case offers an opportunity to the department to set up an expert team of trackers and vets. But a word of caution: Wildlife experts and activists are opposed to the idea of the forest department hiring Hyderabad-based hunter, Nawab Shafat Ali Khan, who had earlier been commissioned to trap/tranquilise/kill a leopard in December 2017. Khan’s trigger-happy ways are controversial, to say the least. The department’s main intention is to save the life of the animal and, if possible, relocate it to some other habitat. Killing is always the last resort and T-1 deserves a shot at life.