Then, on May 19, when she was just 18 months old, she killed Shrisagari Thakre, a 52-year-old Halda villager.
She first attacked cattle in April this year in the southern forests of Bramhapuri. A radio-collared tigress named Kala, for instance, was found to move only at night, avoiding humans even if they were just 100 metres away and rarely venturing near villages.īut T27C1 was no Kala.
Animal rights slacktivistsĪ 2014 study offered some clues to the reason for the comparatively low level of conflict here. Moreover, the conflict is restricted to a few pockets. The division is home to 608 villages, 47 tigers and more than 80 leopards (2016 camera-trapping estimate by Wildlife Conservation Trust), and yet in the past four years, only 13 people have been killed, 205 injured and 2,549 heads of cattle grabbed by wild cats. Despite such proximity, though, conflict has been remarkably low. Densely populated, humans and big cats live cheek-by-jowl in Brahmapuri. T27C1, more commonly known as the ‘Bramhapuri problem tigress’ began life in the Bramhapuri forest division of Chandrapur district - home to the Tadoba Tiger Reserve and the ‘tiger capital’ of Maharashtra. Harle’s real killer, however, was not the tigress but the astonishing apathy of self-proclaimed wildlife activists and conservationists, forest officers and politicians, who should have known better than to release a conflict tiger into Bor Tiger Reserve, around which are scattered dozens of villages. He was the third person she had killed in five months. On the evening of September 19, a tigress known as T27C1 attacked and killed Harle on a field in his village. A poor, 55-year-old farmer and a resident of Vadala Vardhpur village in Maharashtra’s Wardha district, Harle will become another statistic, a collateral in the man-animal conflict, a forgotten footnote in the grand narrative of tiger conservation.
Bhivji Harle is a name that won’t be remembered.
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