BENGALURU: Remember the grandma’s tale of a boy crying out about a wolf coming to attack a herd of sheep, and the villagers not believing him when it actually did? Something similar seems to be playing out in Kodagu these days. Locals and estate owners are making repeated calls to the Forest Department stating that they have seen pug marks or complaining about dogs barking at night on sighting a tiger.
Some others even claimed to have seen a tiger. Acting on each call, foresters are deployed to check, but in most cases, they are turning out to be hoax. After a close analysis of all the cases, the Forest Department has now realised that locals are making such calls so that the department staffers are deployed on their estates and their coffee and pepper crop is protected from thieves.
“Calls about the presence of a tiger have become a daily affair. We get over 10-12 calls a day and none of them can be ignored, as it could be a probable lead. But 99 per cent of the times, it is fake. Since a call has been reported, it becomes mandatory to deploy staffers to check the estate for a few days, which is turning out to be a sort of free protection for the estate by the forest staffers,” commented a senior officer.
The Forest officials are combing areas of south Kodagu for over a week looking for the elusive male tiger, which is said to have claimed three lives and killed many heads of cattle. The department has deployed over 100 staffers, along with darters, veterinarians, tranquilising experts and sharpshooters to catch the tiger. “Due to the repeated calls and tip-offs from locals, the operation is getting effected as a section of the staff has to be diverted. We are now working on getting more staff, where one team will carry out the scheduled plan and the other will act on the calls we receive.,” the official said.