![]() Tigers, highly territorial animals, need a lot of acreage: an adult male may lay claim to more than 35 square miles, and will attack any rival that contests it. More tigers, however, has meant more problems. Today there are an estimated 2,200 tigers in India, and the number is on the rise. Since then, India has established 50 sanctuaries and waged a concerted battle against poachers, who supply tiger bones to the Chinese medicine trade. By 1972, when Indira Gandhi outlawed hunting and began setting aside land for tiger sanctuaries, barely 1,800 animals remained in the wild. Out of 1.3 billion people, there is only me.”įor centuries, Indian nabobs and the British elite hunted tigers for sport an estimated 80,000 tigers were killed between 18 alone. God has made me indispensable! There is no one in the country who is doing what I am doing. “I knew I am the only person who can solve this problem. “These activists and veterinarians, what they are doing was madness,” he tells me two months after the hunt, as he shows me around his regal home in Hyderabad, India’s fourth-largest city. The man on the searchlight yelled that he thought he had seen the tigress cross the road-behind them. Now, as the hunters sat in their open-air Suzuki Gypsy, a single mounted searchlight sweeping the night, Asghar saw a sudden movement in the brush. ![]() But after months of frayed nerves and missed opportunities, this was no time to hesitate. He did not even have a license to shoot the tigress. Asghar did not have his father’s aristocratic swagger, nor his years of experience tracking and killing rogue elephants, man-eating leopards, and wild boars. An open-faced 39-year-old, he was in charge this evening only because his father, the legendary hunter known to most in India by his colonial-era title, “the Nawab,” had been called away on a business trip. The lead hunter, Asghar Ali Khan, had never killed such an animal. After all that had happened in those awful two years-the 13 mutilated bodies, the riots, the court fights, the fruitless hunts-it had come down to this: a carload of five hunters and a man-eating tigress, alone on a lonely country road deep in central India. She was out there in the bushes, prowling in the darkness.
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