Indian police said, on Sunday, that a tiger dubbed “Man-eating Champaran” was shot dead by Indian police after killing at least nine people in a massive operation involving 200 people, including elephant trackers.
The big cat has been terrorizing residents around the Valmiki Tiger Reserve in Champaran, eastern India, killing at least six people for a month including a woman and her eight-year-old son on Saturday.
Even before the last two deaths, authorities described the tiger, believed to be a three- or four-year-old male, as a “man-eating”, meaning it could be wiped out.
Previous attempts to neutralize the animal have failed.
“Two teams went into the woods with two elephants on Saturday afternoon and a third team waited where we thought the tiger would come out, and we shot […] “To kill him there,” local police chief Kiran Kumar told AFP.
When the villagers hit the tin containers, Kumar said, it took the team of eight snipers and about 200 members of the forestry department nearly six hours to complete the operation.
Conservationists blame the rapid expansion of human settlements around forests and major wildlife routes, such as elephants and tigers, as the reason for the increased clashes between humans and animals in some parts of India.
Some 225 people died in tiger attacks between 2014 and 2019 in India, according to government data.
These statistics revealed that more than 200 tigers were killed by poachers or electrocuted between 2012 and 2018.
India is home to about 70% of the world’s tigers, with 2,967 tigers in the country in 2018.
