A pregnant, fertile tigress, treed on a native date palm — petrified of shouting villagers from the Sunderbans, standing in a mob around the foot of the tree. Among all the coverage that the dying, poached, roaring or breeding Indian tigers have had this year, this is the one image, taken a few days after the official tiger census was released, that demands our attention.

The tiger is our charismatic national animal, and the breeding tigress perhaps an even more valuable link in the chain of conservation and translocation. The ratio of breeding tigresses to the breeding tiger is important: usually, a viable tiger population should have more tigresses than tigers. The Sariska tiger translocation, wherein two tigresses and one tiger will be moved from Ranthambore Tiger reserve to Sariska Tiger reserve, will be independent India’s first such attempt to rescue its dwindling tiger population.

Faced with the monsoon rains and luxuriant vegetation, the Wildlife Institute of India had been hard at work trying to locate a suitable tigress. In order to catch the female, the WII team had been at Ranthambore for more than a week, and as it rained, the “healthy, breeding tigress” eluded, gracefully, both sighting and capture — a far cry from the terrified, healthy, breeding and terrestrial specimen that had to actually shin up a tree in order to escape being stoned in the Sunderbans.

With the tiger census released, everyone had an (obvious) opinion on the tiger. Down to 1,411 wild tigers from 3,600 five years ago, it was also obvious the tiger was losing out, horribly. From pregnant tigresses having to climb trees in order to elude mobs, to tiger skins being found in Kerala days after the census announced that tigers were dying because of “poaching and habitat destruction”, it seemed to add up to the simple fact that the magnificent sher, an object of adulation, immortalised on beer bottles, resorts, and all the trappings of Incredible India, was becoming just another weakling trampled by the Great Human Machine.

... contd.