After a 10-day operation, a tiger said to be one of the two big cats in the Dudhwa buffer zone that killed four people in eight days was caught late on Monday night. According to officials, the man-eating tigress was still on the prowl and foresters are still searching for it.
The 6-7-year-old captured tiger will be kept under observation for 12–24 hours before being moved to a zoo. ‘From the analysis of the pugmarks captured by the cameras at the places where human casualties took place, it would be ascertained whether the captured tiger or the tigress caused the casualties,’ said Sanjay Kumar Pathak, field director, Dudhwa Tiger Reserve. This can require a day or so.
Initially, the forest department claimed the presence of two man-eating tigresses (a mother and a daughter) who, according to locals, already have claimed the lives of about 23 people in man-animal conflicts in the villages of Lakhimpur Kheri.
Later, officials explained that the initial statements of the presence of two tigresses were based on pictures from the camera trap that had captured images of two large cats. The department’s media release stated that, ‘on the basis of the head size and body movement, one big cat was identified to be the tigress while the visuals of another big cat were not clear enough, and hence, initially we took it as a tigress. But the big cat captured in the cage was a tiger. Efforts to capture the tigress are on.’
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