The spunky head of Madhya Pradesh forest department, HS Pabla, has courted controversy with some wildlife activists alleging that his move to release a hand-reared tiger among wild ones amounts to murder.
On Sunday, Pabla, who has a reputation for trying out bold ideas, released a 6-year-old tigress into the fearsome company of three wild tigers in the Panna Wildlife Reserve in Madhya Pradesh.
The release is part of the government’s efforts to repopulate the Panna tiger reserve after all its tigers were killed by poachers by 2008.
The experiment, if it succeeds, will break new ground in the area of tiger conservation as there is no recorded case of a hand-reared tiger surviving wild tigers for any considerable length of time, anywhere in the world.
“It is just plain Harakiri,” says PK Sen, former director of India’s highly-acclaimed tiger conservation effort, Project Tiger, referring to the ritual disembowelment carried out on ancient Samurai soldiers to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. “She won’t survive the first encounter with the wild tigers,” he says.
Sen’s position is supported by past experience. Most, if not all such experiments have failed, primarily because hand-reared tigers tend not to have the ‘killer instinct’ or ‘flight instinct’ of wild ones. As tigers are territorial, any new tiger released into existing tiger territory will be challenged by the incumbent.
“Tigers have to know when to fight and when to flee.. If it feels that the other one is more powerful, it should know how to avoid a confrontation,” Sen explains. All this, he says, can only be taught by a tigress mother to its cub and never by a human being, he points out.
“If it chooses to fight instead to flee, then too it won’t stand a chance as hand-reared animals cannot match the aggression and ferocity of wild ones,” he adds, pointing to examples where hand-reared tigers have been torn to pieces by wild ones in encounters.
Pabla, however, says he’s trained the tigress for six years and believes she can overcome and survive. The two tigresses chosen for the project came to them as month-old cubs, but have been bereft of close human interaction for the last several years.
To prepare the tigresses for their tumultuous life ahead, the tigresses stopped being given chopped up flesh and were forced to hunt their own prey, he says.
“Their enclosure in Kanha reserve stretched several hectares and there was a mechanism to lure prey from the adjacent wild area into the territory,” he says, adding that the two tigresses account for nearly 300 kills so far, mostly spotted deer.
Pabla says he thought of the idea because it became too difficult to source wild tigers to re-populate Panna. When he approached other reserves for wild tigers, they feared that removing an existing tigress would destabilize their carefully balanced reserves.
“On the other hand, we had too many tiger cubs orphaned by poachers and encounters.. My staff spends too much time taking care of them,” he says.
If the first tigress successfully adapts to Panna, the second one will be released in a few months, he says. Some on the activist side are more receptive to the idea. “It’s a highly controversial move.. Let’s see how it goes,” says Ravi Singh, head of WWF in India.
