Nepal: The number of tigers tripled – now they go to attack

It is morning on the plain in southern Nepal. The sun is on its way up and the wildlife caretakers in the Chitwan National Park have prepared the elephants for a trip through the dense vegetation.

On each elephant sit two game keepers and a soldier. The latter is a protector.

– Our main focus is to look for poachers. It is easiest from an elephant back, says Prabin Pude, one of the coordinators at the national park’s office.

The number of poachers has decreased sharply since 2010.

Without the 54 elephants at the disposal of the park, the game keepers would find it difficult to perform their work. Four -wheel drive vehicles get stuck in the mud during the monsoon season. The elephants are large enough and terrifying that tigers lying and press in the grass will not attack them.

– The elephants are particularly good when we get to tall grass and we sweep in width, says Prabin Pude.

He and his colleagues Also looking for damaged animals, and tigers that killed people. When a tiger has attacked a human being, the wildlife guards try to catch it because the probability is high that it attacks again.

Seven tigers are therefore currently held in captivity in the Chitwan National Park, says Abinash Thapa Mags, another of the park’s guards. They are fed with ten kilos of meat a day, which is on the scarce budget. But there are no alternatives to keeping them locked up.

Nepal’s Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli recently recognized the growing number of tiger attacks.

– We are a small country that has more than 350 tigers. We can’t have so many tigers and let them eat people, he said in a speech.

For us are 150 tigers Enough people, the Prime Minister continued and suggested that Nepal start to distribute tigers to other countries.

– The Prime Minister is well worried by the growing number of accidents and wants to listen to the people. But if the tigers can be sent to other countries is a scientific issue that must be carefully investigated, says Prakash Man Shrestha.

He is a coordinator at the local office in the village of Meghuati, which tracks tigers in the tree -growing areas outside the national parks in southern Nepal – which the wildlife carers call buffer zones.

What is to be considered to be too many tigers, according to Prakash Man Shrestha and other experts, has no clear answer. Ideally, if every tiger has rich access to quarrying such as deer, antelopes and wild buffalo in its vicinity. But also that they can live close to people in the forest areas without fatal clashes.

The tigers were here on the terais plain near the border with India long before man. Even a hundred years ago, around 100,000 tigers are estimated to have wandered around Asia. Forest harvesting and unmatched poachers were then eradicated them. In the 1970s, the crisis was acute in Nepal, when fewer than 50 Bengali tigers remained.

For ten years, up to 2006The War a guerrilla war in Nepal, staged by Maoist rebels. The civil war enabled poachers to operate freely.

The peace agreement and then a decision in 2010 of about ten Asian countries to double the number of tigers meant that several forces began to cooperate: Wildlife Conservation, the Nepalese military, local residents who reported suspected poachers and international organizations such as WWF and Zoological Society of London.

Nepal succeeded best of all countries and increased the number from 121 tigers to 355, to 2022. It is a success that has given echo, but which also led to the number of people killed by tigers.

One of those who happened to be bad is Lila Raj Kumal, a 61-year-old man, who one day in mid-May two years ago had gone a few hundred meters from his home to gather firewood in a forest grove during a special wood collector’s day. Fortunately, he was joined by his wife Mangal Maya Kumal.

– I don’t remember anything. When the tiger tore my face up on me, I became unconscious and did not wake up until the hospital much later, he says.

The scar runs along The one side of the face from the forehead down to the lower jaw, which today is held together by a metal bolt.

His wife saved him.

– I got hold of a wooden stick and hit the tiger as hard as I could, while screaming. Then it ran from there. I got greater forces than I thought I had, she says standing outside the couple’s house.

Lila Raj Kumal gratefully looks at his wife.

– I’ve had a second life thanks to my wife, he says, today, almost completely restored.

– But never that I go and look for firewood in the forest again.

It was the first time any of them saw a tiger. The same tigers that attract the tourists to the nearby National Park Chitwan. And who sometimes become ejected by other tigers from the national park and then seek the wooded buffer zone between the park and the villages.

The official statistics From Nepal’s government says: 32 killed and 15 injured residents since 2018.

Prakash Man Shrestha, snails out the window in the tiger tracks barracks, when he compares today’s situation with it in the late 1990s.

– Then three, four people were killed on average a year by tigers. In recent years it has been 16-17 every year.

All cases do not appear to be reported and reach the authorities’ rolls in Kathmandu.

Prakash Man Shrestha says that the tigers who attack people are often young and inexperienced and have been pressed out of the national parks of larger males.

– We think they act most in self -defense because they become desperate when they end up near the villages, he says.

The tigers do not go in In the villages, except on occasional occasions, he clarifies. The attacks often occur when residents go down to the river to fish or collect firewood in the forest.

– We had a notorious human -eating female here between 2010 and 2017. She had a taste of human meat and was smart. She could kill a person and then disappear for a few months, before showing up and killed in new places along the river.

Her imprints in the ground differed from other tigers with a peculiar shape at a claw. The employees at the Tiger Office learned to recognize her track. But in 2017 she disappeared from the area.

Now gamekeepers are trying to reduce the risk of locals and domestic animals being attacked by tigers. The farmers get help building strong courtyards around the fields where their livestock goes. A campaign that is ongoing assumes that it is man who has to change his behavior.

– For those who have to go to the forest to gather firewood, we have made recommendations, such as not wearing colorful clothes, to work in groups and to appoint someone who is looking for tigers while the others work, says Abinash Thapa Mags at the Wildlife Conservation Office in Kasara.

– The goal now must be to try to keep the number of tigers, not to increase the population.

The men at the local Tiger office in the village of Meghuati are of the same opinion. Coordinator Prakash Man Shrestha knows what resurrection it becomes every time a tiger kills a human being.

– More than 3,000 people a year die from snake bites in Nepal, compared to maybe 16 killed by tigers. Mosquitoes are, of course, even more dangerous, which spreads dengue fever and malaria, yet it is the tigers who get the attention.