“The only way that communities can survive is by going deeper into the forests to collect resources like honey, fish, shrimps and crabs, and wood for their boats and homes,” Rashid said. “They are more vulnerable than they used to be. People now rely far more on the forest for subsistence.”
“In the past, people could cross the river and go into the forest without too much danger; now the tiger is attacking people more,” Selina said. “In the last five years, 10 people from Jelepara have died in tiger attacks. There are many tiger widows here. Ten years ago perhaps one tiger would cross the river a year. The animal would take a cow or a goat and that would be that. Now we have two or three visits a year.”
Tigers are being forced to come out of the forest more because they have less prey than before, Rashid said. His research suggests that most of the victims were attacked from behind and that nearly 80 percent died. It also put to rest theories that tigers always eat their victims. In just 7 percent of the attacks did they fully consume humans. Usually, it seems, they took just a few bites, or, as in Jelepara, just killed and left them.
Theories abound as to why Sunderbans tigers are more aggressive than elsewhere. Some wildlife experts say the water in this coastal area is more salty and this puts them in a state of constant discomfort. Others speculate that the only way a tiger can defend its territory in these tidal areas is to physically dominate everything that enters. Another possibility is that these animals have grown used to human flesh due to the weather. Cyclones kill many people each year and human bodies drift into the swampy waters, where tigers scavenge them.
Equally possible is that tigers in the remote, largely inaccessible Sunderbans were never subject to the hunting massacres that took place in colonial times on the subcontinent, and so have never developed a fear of humans.
Today, the villagers’ fears are well-founded
“One man in Jelepara was so afraid of being killed by a tiger that he moved to India to find work. But he was sent back and had to go to the forest to subsist. He was killed immediately,” said another man in the village.
The hostility between the world’s two top predators has been based on equal amounts of fear and respect. Fishermen and honey collectors say prayers and perform rituals to the forest gods before setting out on expeditions.
In some areas, people going into the forest wear masks looking like faces on the back of their heads, in the belief that tigers always attack from behind. This is said to have worked for a short time, but it seems that the tigers quickly realized it was a hoax, and the attacks continued. On the Indian side of the Sunderbans, people going into the forests wear stiff pads on their backs to prevent the tigers biting the spine, one of their favorite ways to attack.
“If you want to stop the tiger killing people and want to protect the tiger, then you must reduce poverty in the region,” Rashid said. “If you reduce poverty you can increase biodiversity. Development is the best conservation here. Otherwise, the tiger will come again and again to the villages and will kill more people. And people will not stop going to the forest, so the deaths will continue.”
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