Death of an old, injured tigress, or, a series of truly unfortunate events in Almora

A tigress died on Tuesday night at Marchula in Almora district. But that’s where the trouble didn’t end: some reports spoke of a tiger carcass being found there, others said the big cat had been shot by forest officials. Till Wednesday evening, the facts of the matter remained unclear, so much so that one portal chose to headline its report on the confusion surrounding the event. Firstpost has pieced together the facts of this unlikely tale, and it is a rather unfortunate one. Read on:

It was about 9.15 pm in Marchula, and this picturesque town at one edge of the Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand was in slumber mode. All of a sudden, one keen-eyed resident of the Marchula Bazaar spotted a striped cat, a big one, padding around the mostly shuttered shops and interspersed dwellings. As the tiger – later identified as a tigress - continued to prowl around, seemingly looking for a way to enter a building, any building, practically everybody in the locality got to the nearest roof for a grandstand view.

The forest department was called, and is usual in Uttarakhand, they responded quickly, a team from the nearby Kalagarh Forest Reserve driving to the market as fast as they could. On seeing the tigress at large, Forest Inspector Mohan Chandra Bhatt did the right thing, and fired nine rounds in the air from his .315 calibre government-issue rifle.

Bear in mind here that the .315 rifle would have had to be reloaded since its magazine can only take five cartridges. Loading a .315 rifle magazine is not a question of ramming in the cartridges like in the movies; the .315 is a rimmed cartridge and they have to be staggered to keep the rims distinct or there will be chambering problems you don’t want when dealing with an animal like a tiger.

Bhatt may have fired off the magazine rapidly and then individually fed a round into the breech after drawing the bolt back for four such cycles. Either way, it takes steady hands indeed to do this when facing a tiger and a crowd cheering from the rooftops.

But it didn’t work. By this time, the crowd was restless and apparently disappointed at not seeing any action of the killing kind.

The rest of the action is evident from a video doing the rounds: a white vehicle pulls up near the apparently disoriented tigress, twin barrels of a shotgun peeping ominously from one back window like the cannon of a warship.

अल्मोड़ा के मरचूला बाजार में आधी रात काे एक बाघ पहुंच गया। जहां बंद गाड़ी से उस पर फायरिंग की गई। वहीं सुबह क्षेत्र में एक बाघ मृत मिला, जिसकी गोली लगने से मौत हुई है। चर्चा है कि जिस बाघ पर रात में गोली चलाई गई, मृत बाघ वही है। pic.twitter.com/jIE5sTDT8I

— skand shukla (@skandshukla1) November 15, 2022

The people begin to shout: “Maro! Maro!” Forest Ranger Dheeraj Singh, the man with the 12-bore, is the focus of this pressure. He responds by discharging both barrels of his shotgun, very sensibly firing into the ground just before the animal in order to drive it off rather than kill it.

The tigress appears to flinch at the second shot but doesn’t appear to be mortally wounded.

Singh did the right thing too, for attempting to kill a full-grown tiger with a shotgun usually has tragic results for the person at the butt end of the weapon. He fired into the ground near the tiger hoping that the some of the pellets from the cloud discharged by his shotgun would ricochet and sting the animal. That, and the sound of the gun, he must have hoped would scare the animal back into the forest it had evidently strayed out of.

But the tigress, who didn’t even receive one direct shot, stumbled away. And died. A look at it revealed it to be an old animal, estimated at between 10 and 14 years of age which is old for a wild tiger. Its coat was pale, body very lean, and teeth and claws worn down to stubs.

In keeping with the law, Dheeraj Singh was booked under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. A committee was set up the forest department to investigate.

And then came the post-mortem examination

The post-mortem examination of the tiger’s body was done in the presence of senior forest officials, including one nominated by the National Tiger Conservation Authority, a retired sub-divisional forest officer and a local NGO’s nominated representative. The procedure was conducted by Dr Dushyat Sharma, Senior Veterinary Officer of Corbett Tiger Reserve, and Dr Himanshu Pangati, Senior Veterinary Officer at the Nainital Zoo.

According to the post-mortem report, the female tiger died due to blood pressure complications cause by the pellet injury in her right thigh. As importantly, a porcupine quill of about 10 cm length was found embedded in the tiger’s liver, leaving this crucial organ badly damaged. The stomach and intestines of the female tiger were completely empty, and there was an infection in her lungs. The pellets from the 12-bore were found only in the thigh of the right leg which also had an entry wound.

The wound in the tigress’s right thigh was sufficient to send her blood pressure haywire, and it’s not rocket science to safely surmise that she was knocking on tiger heaven’s door anyway. The tigress could have been in a semi-conscious daze too, for these animals do not like to stroll through town markets, and neither do man-eaters hunt without stealth or in such places.

Tigers are usually poor at catching porcupines, an enduring mystery of our jungles given the agility of these cats and the fact that porcupines need to walk backwards in order to embed their quills into an attacking beast.

Leopards are far better at making meals of porcupines which are plentiful in Uttarakhand’s forested landscape.

Embedded porcupine quills are often the cause of a tiger turning man-eater because of the chronic injuries they cause and which impair the cat’s ability to hunt regular prey. Jim Corbett, for instance, has related how such embedded quills were the cause of the scourge called the Talla Des man-eating tigress.

It is worth noting that one Kamla Devi, a resident of Sankar, was attacked by a tiger on November 8 in Jamaria of Corbett Tiger Reserve Salt Block. She was first referred to Ramnagar and then to Kashipur in critical condition.

The woman recuperated and is healthy and back home. After this attack, officials from Sankar to Jamaria located in the Mandal range of Kalagarh Forest Division were on the hunt for a possible man-eater, or a mauler at the least.

It is also worth mentioning that it is rare to survive a tiger mauling, much less a deadly attack made with intent to kill and eat. That the woman survived could well be because the offending tiger – or tigress as is likely in this case – had no teeth and blunt claws, classic marks of old age.

Harking back to the great Corbett, the first man-eater he killed was the Champawat tigress. This animal, which holds the record for most humans killed by a single animal, was struck by a heavy .500 calibre bullet first from a distance of a few yards. It is a testament to the tremendous vitality of this beast that it lived on and retreated to a ledge. There, Corbett shot at it again with a borrowed, old and out-of-condition shotgun.

The tigress gave up the ghost but the slug from the shotgun was found embedded between two foreclaws; Corbett prised it out later. The point is that the tigress was dying of the .500 calibre round that had ripped through her chest, and it was the shock of being fired at again from the shotgun that killed her outright. Corbett has written as much.

One of the veterinary doctors associated with the happenings at Marchula made the same point to Firstpost, albeit obliquely. “I was one hour driving time from the spot, and as soon as I received the information, I readied my team and rushed to the rescue. But when we were just about to reach, I received a call from the forest officials that the she died. We could have saved her if we had reached earlier but for how many days is another question," he said.

The doctor, who prefers to remain anonymous, said it was “pretty clear after just looking” at the tigress that she was weak and old. “As we began the autopsy, it turned out she had compromised organs, she was going through a pathological condition due to which she was going to die in a few days, however, the 15-20 pellets which hit her in the right thigh caused a synergetic impact on her body leading to an increased blood pressure,” he said.

It appears that the forest department did the right thing in trying to drive the animal away with gunshots in the air. The ranger also had the presence of mind to discharge his shotgun, which fires an expanding cloud of pellets, into the ground rather than the air where a stray pellet could have hurt the someone on the rooftops.

Tranquilising a tiger isn’t like shooting darts, and it couldn’t have been done at such short notice and in such a tense situation.

There doesn’t seem to be intent to kill; the only apparent intent was to defuse the situation and send the tigress back into the woods where it could be dealt with later without any danger to the public. People could have fallen off the rooftops they were crowding (remember Delhi’s ‘Monkey Man’?), and immediate action was imperative.

The law and the probe will take its own course. Instead of baying for punishment to the men who did the right thing in very difficult circumstances, one can only hope their actions are recognised for what they were: an attempt to save human lives. From an old tigress that was close to dying anyway.

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