Ooty: Man-animal conflicts hog headlines in hills

Ooty: The man-animal conflict, including a man-eater episode, that resulted in loss of lives in 2016 in Nilgiris, scripted the jungle episodes that dominated the headlines this year.

For the third consecutive year, the man-eater tiger episode surfaced again during the early part of the year, as the carnivore, which killed a plantation labour in Wood briar estate in Gudalur near here left the locals panic-stricken in early March.  

Indeed that saw foresters, assisted by cops, sweating it out for a week before the cops gunned down the man-eater amid a high drama wherein two policemen were injured in cross firing.

However, when the foresters began to heave a sigh of relief, the wild jumbo duo raided the human settlements in Pandalur belt and killed two persons. While that led to public unrest, the foresters formed a special team and they scripted a success story by capturing one of the rouge and killer wild jumbos, which was eventually re-located to the elephant camp at Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (MTR) where it is being trained along with the kumki elephants.

While six persons are reported to have died of jumbo attacks in Nilgiris in 2016, a man-eater tiger killed one person and a tourist was killed by a stray gaur attack in Sim’s Park in Coonoor in the latter part of the year.  These apart, little more than a dozen persons were injured due to wild jumbos, stray gaur and stray bear attacks during the year.

This clearly indicated that the year 2016 was not that smooth in the wildlife management arena, as solutions were evading to either control or avoid man-animal conflicts, point out experts.

Strangely in 2016, the stray gaur problem loomed large and man-guar conflict has begun to emerge in a big way as there were reports from across the hills about stray gaur entering human settlements that is proving to be an emerging issue for the foresters to deal with.

While the organisations like the ‘Nilgiris Tribal Solidarity’ had been pleading for an interaction between the foresters, administration and the public to find a meaningful solution to handle the man-animal conflict with the traditional wisdom of hill communities and chalking out ways for meaningful compensation for the victims, the officialdom hardly cared in tackling this problem.