Man-Eaters

Under most circumstances, a tiger would rather avoid crossing tracks with man. Man does not feature on the regular diet of a tiger and it is as vary of humans as they are of tigers.

The transformation of a tiger into a man-eater begins only when some some factors begin to deprive a tiger of it's ability to outwit and overpower it's normal prey. These factors can be quite wide ranging from porcupine quils leading to festering wounds, to poacher's gunshots not completing their job.

A tiger is confronted with prey species that have fine-tuned all their senses to detect the approach of a predator before it gets them. They all have excellent hearing and smelling powers, which give them enough of a warning to sprint away from danger.

This was an actual man-eating tigress who had totally lost her fear of mankind and had to be captured and kept at the Delhi Zoo

The tiger's prey species have developed excellent sense of sight and hearing.

It is due to this that a tiger has to very often cut short it's stalk and break into a charge to bring down a fleeing prey. Even with it's incredible powers of stalking and tremendous burst of speed, the tiger only has a success rate of below 20 percent. When a tiger gets injured due to some reason and is unable to perform at it's best, it becomes more and more difficult for it to hunt successfully.

It is during this phase that if an injured tiger crosses paths with a human, which results in the latter being killed, it realises the physical weakness of man and includes him in it's menu. Once a tiger loses it's fear of man, it is one of the most dangerous animals in the world. They are known to be violently aggressive without reason and definitely pose a threat to the human population in the area. In such cases, they are now captured and put in zoos. It is only in cases where the circumstances are totally unavoidable that man-eaters are shot dead and not captured.

As they say, there is always an exception to the rule. This holds true in the case of man-eating tigers as well. In the Sunderban National Park, within the state of West Bengal, the tigers have evolved with one different aspect in comparison to tigers anywhere else. "Mankind" does feature on the menu of their natural diet. They are known to hunt fishermen in boats and honey collectors in the forests. Many ideas have been implemented here to try and associate man with danger and as something to be avoided. One of these ideas is to set up electrified dummies around the forest to make a tiger associate humans with a slightly painful electric shock.

Man features on the regular diet of the tigers in the swaps of Sunderbans National Park

Knowing that man-eaters always attack from the back, the honey collectors wear mask on the back of their head to try and fool the tiger into believing that it is being watched.

The old school of thought - once a man-eater, always a man-eater.

There are two opposing schools of thought. One feels that man-eaters can never be made to disassociate man as a natural prey species. Once a man-eater, always a man-eater. The other school of thought feels that this is not really true. They feel that a man-eater can be taught and made to realise that man should not feature on it's regular diet. One of the parks that have tried experimenting with this second school of thought is the Dudhwa National Park in Northern India. The arguments still continue and it is doubtful there will ever be a final conclusion, as it wouldn't be very easy to get volunteers to prove whether a tiger is a man-eater any longer or not!

The sad part about man-eaters is that they are responsible to a large extent of the overall image most humans have of tigers. Vicious and mindless killers. Nothing could be further from the truth.