Villagers object to elephants in Pilibhit tiger tranquilisation drive

The tranquilising team of forest officials and Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) experts faced a new hurdle in running the tranquilising operation as the villagers protested against the use of elephants in the operation.

The villagers asked the officials not to bring the elephants to their cane fields as they were destroying the crops. The team had started the tranquilising operation on August 25. After the objections of the villagers,the team is now planning to construct temporary scaffolds in the area where the tiger is learned to be roaming.

The tiger has been spotted several times in the cane fields,about 4 km from the Haripur range forest,by the villagers but it vanished from there before the tranquilising team reached.

Pilibhit Divisional Forest Officer (Social Forestry) Arvind Kumar Singh said they had not been able to get the location of the tiger in the last two days and before that it was sighted in the cane fields near Rudrapur village.

He said that after the team stopped the use of elephants,it had become difficult to run the operation. Currently,the cane crop is quite large and the movement of elephants in the fields damages crops,Singh said,adding that they will use the scaffolds to run the operation.

He said it was very difficult to tranquilise the tiger without cutting the crop and the season for cutting the crop is more than two months away. They are also trying to trap the tiger by putting a cage with a bait in it but till now there has been no success.

Forest officials had fetched elephants from Dudhwa National Park for the tranquilising operations.