Who will bell the cat? Or rather, fell the cat? That’s the question racking the brains of the top brass in the UP forest department (UPFD) nowadays.
Who will bell the cat? Or rather, fell the cat? That’s the question racking the brains of the top brass in the UP forest department (UPFD) nowadays. The poser relates to the fate of a two-and-a-half-year-old tiger, who has strayed from its natural habitat in the Dudhwa National Park reserve forest area and has already killed three persons in the past one month.
The UPFD is now in a quandary. While the department has issued a death warrant against the man-eater, forest minister Fateh Bahadur Singh said the tiger would be captured alive. Even the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) has also opposed the shooting order.
To add to the tangle, there’s also a legal angle now. Three petitioners from Lakhimpur Kheri, from where the tiger originally strayed, have filed a PIL before the Allahabad high court seeking quashing of the death warrant.
The confusion is further confounded as there are not one, but three tigers who have gone astray in different parts of the state. While the tiger facing a death sentence is lurking near Faizabad, another tiger has wandered out of the forests in Lakhimpur Kheri near Dudhwa. The third one sauntered into east UP’s Ghazipur from Bihar’s Kaimur forest range. But it is the young tiger which is proving to be the toughest challenge. “I have asked my officials to catch it alive,” Singh told DNA.
When asked about the death warrant, he said: “We are reconsidering it.” However, UPFD principal chief conservator of forests BK Patnaik said: “The tiger has turned into a man-eater. We can’t allow it to take any more innocent lives. It has to be killed.” He also said that the tiger had lost its ‘conservation value’ as after killing human beings, it could not be released into the forests.
But a retired forest official, insisting anonymity, said that as per NTCA guidelines, a tiger can be labelled ‘man-eater’ only after it has been established that the animal has refused to have its natural prey, and has instead opted for human beings.
Meanwhile, petitioners, who have filed the PIL, have also accused the UPFD of shirking duty and passing orders for the tiger’s death “without making sincere efforts to tranquilise and trap it”. The tiger has managed to outsmart all the manoeuvres this far.
Four ace-shooters authorised to kill the errant beast have been following its spoor atop trained elephants. More than a hundred UPFD men are on its trail, over a hundred tranquiliser darts have been blunted and a dozen cage traps dodged.
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