Tiger with Taste for Human Meat Kills and Drags Indian Girl to Forest

A tiger has killed a nine-year-old girl and dragged her body into a forest in the Shahdol district of Madhya Pradesh state, India, as reported on Friday, November 11.

The incident occurred when the young girl was with her grandmother and sisters in a rice field.

Indian Girl Tiger Attack

Forest officials have attempted to locate the tiger after finding the body of the Indian girl named Poonam Gond, with a post-mortem indicating that she died from sustained injuries to her neck and waist, according to Newsweek.

Shahdol Divisional Forest Officer Gaurav Chaudhary told the Hindustan Times that the tiger had been seen previously roaming in the area but had not attacked any humans.

However, it is still not clear if the girl is the indeed the first victim of the tiger across the state.

The Man-Eater of Champaran

The tiger attack on a girl in Madhya Pradesh comes a month after locals and Indian officials launched a large-scale hunt to a vicious three-year old Bengal tiger called, the "man-eater of Champaran," which was responsible for at least nine deaths in Bihar state.

The said operation led to the shooting and killing of the tiger, which is also known as T-104, which lived in a forest and sugar cane fields near the a village in the district of West Champaran, Bihar, ABC News reported.

India Tiger Attacks

Indians living in rural areas are known for their tolerance when it comes to co-habiting with potentially deadly wild animals, including tigers.

One does not find this kind of setup in other cultures and if this happened in Montana or Brazil, they would wipe out everything, according to Ullas Karanth, a retired carnivore biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society and a known expert on tigers, as cited by the BBC.

Karanth asserts tiger attacks are relatively rare, with approximately 40 to 50 people killed each year and this is lower compared to around 350 peopled killed by elephants annually, as cited by the London-based broadcasting company.

It is for this reason that elephant attacks are reportedly treated by the public as common as a car accident but tiger attacks are a big deal that can instill fear to communities.

While the said tiger of Champaran and other big cats of India have been negatively branded by both residents and local authorities, not all tigers are man-eaters.

Karanth estimated that only 10 to 15 of the wild animals have become the predators of humans each year.

India Tiger Deaths

Tiger attacks in India has a long history that dates back to the South Asian country's British colonization and the post-colonial human settlement expansion, which increased the likelihood of human-wildlife conflict, specifically with elephants and tigers.

While tigers have killed a relatively high number of humans in previous years, it is nothing compared to the total number of tiger deaths caused by human-induced hunting and habitat loss for the large cats.

At the time of India's independence in 1947, there were apparently 40,000 members of the tiger population in the country.

However, the said human activities have lowered their populations to dangerous levels.

In 2021, India's National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) said 126 of the endangered tigers died.

This figure is followed by 121 tiger deaths in 2016 since the Indian government started compiling data in 2012, as cited by Phys.org.

In a country of approximately 1.3 billion people, India is also home to around 75% of the world's tiger population.

With this, the NTCA added that poaching and natural causes, in addition to human encroachment, are also some of the causes of tiger deaths in India.