BHOPAL: A six-months-old tiger cub was found dead in the Kanha Tiger Reserve in Balaghat district of Madhya Pradesh on Monday morning, taking the total tiger casualty in the state in the first 29 days of 2018 to seven.
The cub was found dead near the Babathenga pond in dense Mukki forests of Kanha Tiger Reserve (KTR), two days after a male tiger aged between four and five years was found electrocuted at a village in Shahdol district, close to the Bandhavgarh National Park-Tiger Reserve on Saturday morning.
According to KTR field director Sanjay Shukla, the cub aged between six and seven months found dead in near the Babathenga pond was one of the four offsprings of tigress T-27 “Dhavajhandi.”
The magnitude of injuries sustained by the tiger cub which were revealed during the autopsy, strongly suggest that the cub could have fallen prey to an intruder male tiger T-24 “Jamunbol.”
“The autopsy revealed that first vertebral column of the cub, besides its neck and other body parts had been badly crushed by the incisive canines, possibly of the male intruder tiger, which led to the cub’s death,” Shukla told The New Indian Express.
Shukla said that out that all four offsprings of the tigress T-27 were found along with their mother last on January 25 and 26, but since last night three of the cubs were missing. While one of them has been found dead now, two others are still missing. Another offspring of the tigress was found safe and alive on Monday morning, possibly as it had been hidden by the mother tiger at a safe hideout. “It’s quite possible that two other missing cubs of T-27 tigress could have been hidden safely by the tigress elsewhere in the forests,” said Shukla.
The KTR presently houses 80-plus adult tigers and around 35-40 tiger cubs.
With the tiger cub being found dead on Monday in KTR, the total tiger casualty of big striped cats in January 2018 has shot to seven, while the total tiger deaths in the state since January 2016 has spurted to 62. According to the 2014 tiger census MP with 308 tigers was third in tiger count after Karnataka and Uttarakhand.