Rajasthan’s Ranthambore National Park (RNP) has a big cat problem.
Twenty-five tigers have “disappeared”, some for more than a year, the state’s chief wildlife warden Pavan Kumar Upadhyay informed RNP authorities on Nov 4.
This is the first time such a large number of tigers has been reported missing from the park, said The Times of India. In 2022, 13 tigers were reported missing, but it happened over a three-year period, between January 2019 and January 2022.
The high number of missing cats has triggered panic in Rajasthan, with Mr Upadhyay constituting a three-member committee to investigate the incident.
“The idea is to fix the system so that we know why these tigers are missing, and we’re aware of what changes to make so it doesn’t recur. Missing tigers isn’t a good thing,” he told ThePrint.
However, RNP field director K.R. Anoop felt the the word “missing” is a misnomer.
“Just because the big cats haven’t been detected – either through camera traps or pug marks – doesn’t mean that they are missing,” he said. “Tigers live and die, it’s part of their natural cycle. The focus should be on the overall number of tigers in the reserve, rather than on ‘missing tigers’ and blaming the forest department for mismanagement.”
Spread over 400 sq km, the RNP, near Sawai Madhopur town, had 88 tigers in 2023. According to the National Tiger Conservation Authority data, four deaths were reported this year, and three in 2023.
On Nov 4, villagers killed another tiger after it was blamed for the death of a shepherd.
“Tigers engage in territorial fights, some are in deep interiors of the forests and perish there. We can’t keep track of every tiger,” said Mr Anoop, explaining that the forest department’s daily patrolling activities are restricted to paths and tracks.
There have been cases of Ranthambore tigers moving to the nearby Dholpur-Karauli Tiger Reserve. There has also been at least one tiger that went missing from Ranthambore and turning up in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park in 2013, It was returned to Ranthambore in 2022.
“In a scavenger-heavy forest, it is entirely possible that a tiger dies and its carcass is eaten within two weeks without the forest department finding out,” said Mr Anoop.
Author and conservation biologist with the Ranthambore-based NGO Tiger Watch Dharmendra Khandal said it is possible that some tigers died during retaliatory attacks by villagers, either by poisoning or other methods.
“Two tigers have been killed in the last year or so due to this reason, but the number could be a lot higher,” he said.
