6 ms·

Great news unless you are living in a village near the tigers. These are not animals I would want living near me. There are an estimated 270 tigers in Sunderban

• wnevets 12y ago
  How many of those exist? 3?
• icebraining 12y ago
  I'm sure the tigers have no particular interest in having you living near them either.
  • blumkvist 12y ago
    I'm sure they don't have a particular interest in conservation of the human kind too.
    • bitwize 12y ago
      "Listen lads, there's only a few of us, and 7 billion of them. They could stand to lose a few of their numbers. What say we help ourselves to a smooth-ape buffet lunch?"
      • jkaunisv1 12y ago
        Thank you for the phrase "smooth-ape buffet", and the term "smooth-ape" in particular.
• majestic1211 12y ago
  The source you provide gives a number of 0-50 a year, not 100-250.
  • mousa 12y ago
    That has been edited (maybe corrected) since I posted
    • icebraining 12y ago
      According to the article history, it was edited to correspond to the number in the main article[1], which cites a proper source. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attacks_in_the_Sundarbans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attacks_in_the_Sundarbans
• dded 12y ago
  > Great news unless you are living in a village near the tigers. This fear that people have of nearby predators is, in fact, a real problem with conservation efforts to preserve those predators. David Quammen addresses this aspect of conservation in his book "Monster of God". He believes the fear of predators is more deep-seated in our psyche than most other fears. I suspect your 100-250 number is high (perhaps way high?) but it only takes one in a village where everyone knows everyone to ratchet-up fear. If a neighbor kid were taken by a bear, I'd sure want the authorities to do something about that bear.
  • wavefunction 12y ago
    Just trying to figure out the circumstances where a bear could "take a child" that don't involve some serious negligence on whoever is supposed to be responsible for the kid. I grew up in a part of the US that is rife with bears and spent my childhood running around in wild areas with coyotes and rattlesnakes and never had any sorts of issues.
• Gracana 12y ago
  That's an unpopular opinion of course, but it's important to understand the attitude of the people living around them. The Outside Online article linked by avemuri elsewhere in this thread gets into the issue. Wildlife conservation is important, but I can't help but empathize with the people living in the surrounding area. With very little work and very little money to go around, and with tigers killing their livestock and rhinos getting into their crops, what are they supposed to do? It doesn't even have to happen often for it to become quite a contentious issue.
  • icebraining 12y ago
    A simple way is to just pay the farmers for the damage. For example, the group Defenders of Wildlife was faced with a similar situation in Montana, where the wolves were getting shot because they ate the livestock of the area. They raised money and paid for the losses in exchange of the promise that the ranchers wouldn't kill the wolves. This doesn't help if people are attacked, of course. http://perc.org/articles/who-pays-wolves http://perc.org/articles/who-pays-wolves
    • brohee 12y ago
      Wolf damage to sheep herds in France is also paid for. There is still opposition to the wolf presence but I guess not being threatened with bankruptcy helps smooth some edges. Also wolves help control the wild boar population, and those can be quite damaging for crops, so the economic impact of the wolf may actually be positive. Eventually, someone is bound to be attacked thought, it will be interesting to see how policy is influenced when it happens. I can see how tigers can be a lot more polarizing.
      • pekk 12y ago
        Wolves essentially never attack humans, particularly by comparison with the frequency of tiger attacks. They are different species, of different sizes, with different diets, with different behaviors. Comparing wolves and tigers is not really sensible. But that doesn't stop people from killing wolves anyway.
    • 12y ago
• pndmnm 12y ago
  On a tangent, this is pretty great article about wild honey gathering in the Sunderbans (including some stories about tigers): http://blog.longreads.com/2014/09/28/the-honey-hunters/ http://blog.longreads.com/2014/09/28/the-honey-hunters/
• kephra 12y ago
  You wont live in a village close to them, as Indian government dislodged the Adivasi of Baiga and Gond tribes, who traditionally lived in the area, that is now a wild life reservation in Kanha, Similipal and Odisha Gondwana. Those people got some pennies for the eviction, barely enough to buy a few days food in big city, but nowhere enough to buy land to live on. See: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/10488 http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/10488 I can really understand that those people join the Naxalite Maoist Army to fight Indian government to get their country back from investors, tourist and other western parasites.
• g13n 12y ago
  I have watched a few documentaries on this topic. I know it sends you spine chills even thinking about it, but many of the attacks are because the men go and gather honey and fish in the Tiger territory because they have almost exhausted them on their side. I wonder many a times, we simply cannot co-exist to create an ecological balance with anything. To quote Agent Smith in the movie Matrix: "It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet."
• linuskendall 12y ago
  Questions of conservation vs livelihoods are incredibly complex, not least in the Sundarbans area (have worked with farmers in this region) - complex in a way you don't see with human-animal conflict in other parts of the world. We are not talking about a few hundred french farmers and wolves here, but rather livelihood of hundreds of thousands. It is probably one of the most densely populated areas lying so close to a tiger reserve. The population around the reserve are some of the most climate stressed farmers in the world (facing soil salinity and monsoon variability due to climate change) and areas inside the forest reserve have traditionally been an important source for additional livelihood (honey collection, fishing, etc.). Farmers settled in these areas were also in part displaced during the colonial era from Bihar and other parts of West Bengal, in essence forced to live in the delta - now of course these are their villages and home towns. To add to the challenge there is an incredible scarcity of food sources for tigers in the Sundarban reserve, with few other large animals, which is put forward as part of the reason they have (unlike tigers elsewhere) have made it a practice to treat humans as food sources. They are adept swimmers and do attack people in boats meaning that even fishing can be a risky endeavour for farmers. All in all, the conflict between people and the tigers living in Sundarban is pretty complex and in no small part caused by people outside of the delta (including the British, the increased urban population of Kolkata and surrounding districts, etc.).
• linuskendall 12y ago
  Questions of conservation vs livelihoods are incredibly complex, not least in the Sundarbans area (have worked with farmers in this region) - complex in a way you don't see with human-animal conflict in other parts of the world. We are not talking about a few hundred french farmers and wolves here, but rather livelihood of hundreds of thousands. It is probably one of the most densely populated areas lying so close to a tiger reserve. The population around the reserve are some of the most climate stressed farmers in the world (facing soil salinity and monsoon variability due to climate change) and areas inside the forest reserve have traditionally been an important source for additional livelihood (honey collection, fishing, etc.). Farmers settled in these areas were also in part displaced during the colonial era from Bihar and other parts of West Bengal, in essence forced to live in the delta - now of course these are their villages and home towns. To add to the challenge there is an incredible scarcity of food sources for tigers in the Sundarban reserve, with few other large animals, which is put forward as part of the reason they have (unlike tigers elsewhere) have made it a practice to treat humans as food sources. They are adept swimmers and do attack people in boats meaning that even fishing can be a risky endeavour for farmers. All in all, the conflict between people and the tigers living in Sundarban is pretty complex and in no small part caused by people outside of the delta (including the British, the increased urban population of Kolkata and surrounding districts, etc.).