Friday, 25 April 2025
Friday, 25 April 2025
The tranquillizer dart had already struck. The 10-year-old male tiger should have gone down. Instead, it charged.
On Monday, in the tea estates of Kerala’s Idukki, the forest department’s rescue operation took a dangerous turn. A tiger had strayed into human settlements and a special team had been tracking it since Sunday, deploying drones and sniffer dogs.
When they finally found the tiger, they moved fast, hoping to tranquillize and capture it alive.
“We fired the tranquillizer shot from just 15 metres away,” a senior forest official told PTI. “It was an inhabited area. We had no choice but to take the risk.”
The tiger, instead of collapsing, lunged at the rescue team, tearing through the shield of a forest guard, smashing the helmet of another. A second tranquillizer dart was fired, but the big cat remained on its feet. The rescue team had no choice but to open fire.
The tiger collapsed, dead.
Big cat rescues often go horribly wrong, both for the animal and the people trying to capture it. A volunteer of a Bengal forest department team who was attacked by a royal Bengal tiger while trying to rescue a villager in the Sunderbans who had climbed up a tree to escape the claws in February returned home from hospital earlier this week. The volunteer has lost his right eye.
The case in Kerala is also not an exception. Tranquillizing a wild animal is never a simple process. It involves precise calculations — age, weight, stress levels, even an animal’s last meal can impact how it responds to sedation.
The danger doesn’t end with sedation either. Tranquillized tigers can suffer from cardiac arrest,haemorrhages, hypoglycaemia. These risks don’t always surface immediately. A tiger may seem fine after sedation but die hours later from complications.
“Every darting attempt is almost like a gamble,” Dr Ravikant S. Khobragade, veterinary officer from Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, Maharashtra, explained to The Telegraph Online.
“Tigers react differently based on weight, age, and stress levels. Under-dosing can result in unexpected aggression, while overdosing can be fatal.”
Stress plays a crucial role.
In high-adrenaline situations, a normal dose may not work, seconded Krishnendu Basak, a conservation biologist.
“In stressed situations, hormones increase heart rate and blood pressure, making a standard dose ineffective. Then additional sedation is needed, but that can turn deadly,” Basak told The Telegraph Online.
Earlier this year in Dausa, Rajasthan, a tiger attack left three people seriously injured. The tiger, one of three that had strayed from Sariska Tiger Reserve, first attacked a woman in a field before turning on two others.
When the forest department arrived, they attempted to tranquillize the animal. It leapt onto their vehicle and fled.
In May 2023, another tranquillization attempt on a Ranthambore tiger named T-104 aka Cheeku also ended in tragedy. Declared a conflict animal after killing three people, he was darted at 6:35am and sent to Udaipur’s Biological Park. By midnight, Cheeku was dead. A post-mortem later revealed that the tiger had an undetected lung infection.
There are other risks in tranquillizing tigers. The big cats are darted in their shoulder or thigh muscles from a distance of 30-40 metres. But if the dart hits the chest instead, it can be fatal, said Khobragade.
In Assam’s Kaziranga National Park, tranquillization has led to deaths on both sides. In 2009, a panic-stricken tiger killed a specialist overseeing its rescue before being shot dead. That year alone, the park recorded 10 tiger deaths.
In Golaghat, Assam, a tigress and her cubs entered a village in May 2004. The cubs were successfully sedated and relocated. But when officials tried to tranquilise the mother, she attacked a mahout, throwing him off his elephant. The incident was captured on video and remains one of the most dramatic wildlife clips ever shot.
The ideal drug to tranquillize a tiger “should have a short induction time, and low mortality properties. Ketamine and xylazine are commonly used,” Yashaswi Rao, a wildlife biologist at Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, told The Telegraph Online.
There is no universal formula.
“Doses vary from tiger to tiger,” Rao said. “Even within the same species, individuals react differently. Stress, metabolism, and prior exposure to drugs all influence the outcome.”
Plus, the role of the rescue team is very important..They must know the behaviour of the animal that is being darted, Rao added.
If any tiger has demonstrated the unpredictability of tranquilisation, it is Zeenat, a three-year-old tigress from Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, Maharashtra.
Relocated to Similipal Tiger Reserve, Odisha, Zeenat was part of a conservation effort to boost tiger populations in new habitats. Zeenat, however, crossed into Jharkhand and finally into Bengal, covering more than 120 km.
She navigated rivers, forests, and human settlements — all while being tracked via her radio collar.
“She was a majestic girl,” Khobragade recalled. “I was there when she was first caught. We darted and collared her without bait. But later, when I heard she was given five to six darts, I felt terrible. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Tigers, unlike leopards, do not eat when stressed.
So, Zeenat refused food for days. By December 14, she had not eaten at all. As hunger grew, she finally made her first kill, a goat, on December 25.
After multiple failed darting attempts, she was finally tranquillized and captured in Bengal’s Bankura district. Weak from exhaustion, she was sedated and transported by forest officials.
“She saw everything,” Khobragade said. “She saw the people coming for her. She saw the guns. She knew something was happening. She was still under anaesthesia…maybe she couldn’t respond.”
As India’s tiger population grows rapidly thanks to conservation efforts bearing fruit, conflicts are inevitable in a developing country where new areas are coming under human inhabitation. Managing the risks is essential. Both for the people and the tigers.
