A man-eating tiger that unleashed terror across villages in northern India has been shot dead after a 45-day search.
Parag Dhakate, Regional Forest Representative, on Friday in New Delhi said the six-year-old big cat, nicknamed the “Sugarcane Tigress’’ for its habit of hiding in plantations, had killed two people and injured five in the past two months.
Dhakate said that a massive search operation involving hundreds of forest guards, a helicopter and drones, ended on Thursday when it was cornered in a sugarcane field and shot 11 times by sharp-shooters.
He said the cat had tormented people across 20 villages in the region, meaning children had not attended school and residents rarely went out in the dark.
He said soon after it was shot dead, jubilant villagers paraded the slain tiger and broke into celebrations.
“Our objective was to capture the tigress and not to kill it.
“We set up eight to 10 cages and made some 26 attempts to tranquilize the animal, but it always gave us the slip,” Dhakate said.
The India’s National Tiger Conservation Authority said that after shrinking for years, major conservation efforts had seen India’s tiger population grow from 1,706 in 2011 to over 2,200 tigers last year.
It said going by estimate, India was home to nearly 60 per cent of the world’s 3,900 tigers in the wild.
