Indian baby boy taken, mother breaks open tiger's mouth to save her son, why are animal attacks so frequent in India?

On September 4 in Romania, a village near the Bandhavgarh Lion Reserve in India, Archana Chaudhary, a 25-year-old young woman, took her son for a walk in a field near her home.

Archana was almost devastated, especially when she saw that the tiger's teeth had pierced her son's head, and she couldn't care less. The son fell to the ground.

The sound of the fight and the son's cries attracted the villagers around, who picked up sticks to drive the tiger away, and then immediately took the mother and son to the hospital.

Fortunately, the son only had his scalp pierced, but Archana's injuries were serious. Her lungs were pierced by the tiger's claws, her neck was fractured, and her whole body was covered with bites and scratches, which are still under emergency treatment, but should not be life-threatening.

The local government said it has formed a team and is bound to catch the tiger that hurt people. But people don't eat it. For years, they have lived in a haze of wild animal attacks, and every so often someone is killed by one.

The villagers say that besides tigers, and leopards, elephants have also entered their villages and destroyed their crops. They live in areas close to forests and national parks where human-animal conflict is becoming a daily occurrence for them. Rapid urbanization is destroying natural habitats, forcing animals into villages and towns in search of prey and shelter.

The government's inability to respond promptly and come up with solutions that satisfy the population further exacerbates human-animal conflict, as people initiate attacks on wildlife.

Human-animal conflict in India

It must be said that India has done a good job in animal protection. Their various protection measures have doubled the number of various wild animals in another five years, but too much protection has directly overlooked the safety of the people living on the edge of the sanctuaries.

India is a vast country with a population of about 1.4 billion, some 3,000 tigers, 6,000 to 11,000 bears, and about 27,000 wild elephants. A joint report by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) released in July 2021 concluded that "no country in the world will experience human-animal conflict as frequently as India at short intervals over the next few years.".

The Pilibhit region near India's border with Nepal has seen more than 60 tiger-related deaths in the past decade, and Kashmir is even more dramatic, with nearly 200 people killed by animals over a decade and "revenge killings" by the population through poisoning and other means.

How to mitigate

To alleviate the conflict between wild animals and the public, the Indian government initially only claimed to deal with animals that hurt people, but many times they did not go away or caught, but after some time and they were put back, which led to animal attacks did not ease, but let the public grievances, more dissatisfaction with wild animals.

This discontent reached its peak, the Indian government began efforts to curb the rise of animal-human conflict.

They began by creating dozens of "elephant corridors" to safely connect elephants in their natural habitat and reduce their misadventure into farmland or residential areas. The government is also advising farmers to plant crops that elephants don't like to eat, such as peppers, lemons, and ginger, and to dig trenches and set up alarm systems to warn people when elephants are near.

For carnivores, the wildlife department is planting fruit and fodder trees in the jungle to attract herbivores. It is hoped that this will attract predators and make them less likely to venture into nearby villages.

Postscript

These measures will certainly be effective, but I feel that they are not enough, as the main root cause of these animals entering human settlements is still the reduction of habitat.

To truly end the mutual attacks between animals and humans, the focus should be on stopping jungle encroachment and deforestation