A tiger is stalking villages in India where poor villagers who need to collect firewood, take their cattle to graze or use the fields as a bathroom are being killed during their daily activities for the past seven week, the Associated Press reported.
The tiger has killed and travelled 120 miles unseen; she has crossed villages, small towns and at least one highway, according to the AP.
The tiger has killed nine villagers so far in north India, all of them poor and living off the habitat most natural to the tiger, the AP reported. The people living in these villages cannot stay in their homes safe and miss work and are not aware of India's recent attempt to conserve the tiger population.
"She has turned into a man-eater," said Vijay Pal Singh, whose neighbor, a 22-year-old farm laborer named Shiv Kumar Singh, was killed as he worked at the edge of a sugarcane field in January, according to the AP.
"People are afraid to go into the fields," said Singh, the AP reported. "Everything has changed."
India brings in hunters to kill man-eating tigers about once a year, but never has a tiger killed so many people in a short period of time without being caught, according to the AP.
Singh has been tracking the female tiger, most recently through the forests and dried riverbeds near where she made her last kill, an elderly buffalo herder, according to the AP. All that was found of the herder was an arm and a leg, but all the buffalos were unharmed.
"She won't stop now. She'll keep killing," said Samar Jeet Singh, a hunter with an aristocratic pedigree, the AP reported. When he finds her, he said, he will shoot her dead.
"The time for tranquilizing is over, the time for caging is over," Singh told the AP. "Now she must be killed."
For years, villagers living about 25 miles away from Corbett National Park, one of India's premier tiger reserves, have not had to worry about tigers and are used to living with the wildlife which includes leopards, monkeys, foxes, bears and wild boars, but tigers have been rare, the AP reported.
India's efforts to preserve the tiger has succeeded and their population has grown substantially, but it has also increased the encounters of tigers and peoples, according to the AP. The canefields surrounding the villages is also inviting to tigers where they hide and stalk their prey, in this case, villagers.
"This area is so rich in wildlife," Vijay Singh, a top regional forestry official in the nearby town of Bijnor told the AP. "That is the problem."
The little that is known about this tiger is that it is female because of its pawprints, and some believe the tiger to be injured, allowing her to overcome her fear of humans, the AP reported. Tigers usually keep away from humans, but as prey, people are much easier to kill.
Now, India officials believe the tiger has grown to prefer human flesh and blood, according to the AP.
"It is because of taste that she is killing now - because of taste only," said Singh, the forestry official.
Others, though, doubt tigers develop a taste for people. The hunters, for instance, believe she probably has a problem with her mouth, perhaps an infected tooth, and has an easier time eating human flesh.
