NILGIRIS: For the second consecutive day, staff of Nilgiris forest division continued to monitor the movement of a tiger, which sustained injuries in one of its legs and has been facing difficulty in walking, at Porthiyada near Ooty on Sunday. The staff are preventing villagers from entering the area to avoid direct encounters with the big cat.
Despite demands from NGOs and animal lovers for the forest department to engage a veterinarian to treat the animal, forest department officials have decided against intervention. “The tiger is not active and it is the right time to capture and treat the animal to save its life as it has been starving for three days,” said a wildlife activist. However, a senior forest department official clarified that a tiger can go without food for seven days, and it is a natural process in the wild for the tiger to get injured from infighting.
“Our staff also confirmed with villagers that they had seen tigers fighting each other on December 31. We can interfere if the animal was injured in a snare (human disturbance). But, in this case, we are monitoring the tiger from a distance as it is not part of wildlife management,” an official said.