On Monday when the State forest officials attributed the death of four cubs in Chandrapur district to an apparent starvation, the Maharashtra Government announced that it would set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) — comprising CBI and State forest officials — to probe the disappearance of the cubs’ mother.
Senior forest official said: “You should realise that the death of four cubs has taken place at least four to five days after they were abandoned by their mother tigress. The cubs were few weeks old. They were too young to hunt to get their feed. Initial investigations have revealed that they were not fed for four days”.
The tigress has so far not been located either dead or alive. The forest officials are not ruling out the possibility of the tigress having been killed by the poachers or the animal having fallen into a well and died.
Meanwhile, announcing the setting up of an SIT to probe the circumstances leading to the death of four cubs, Maharashtra Forest Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar said: “The question before us now is to find out what happened to their mother, whether the tigress has been hunted by poachers or some local farmer has done mischief. There are other possibilities like the tigress dying of thirst or falling into a well also”.
“We have therefore decided to form a SIT, comprising officials from the CBI and the forest department to probe into the disappearance of the tigress. There are officials in the CBI who are experts in incidents relating to animal disappearances. We have sought their help,” Mungantiwar said.
He pointed out that the tigress did not disappear from a tiger conservation forest “where the Government already has deployed a tiger protection force in place, or else the cubs would not have died of malnutrition”.
“The place where the incident has happened is not a natural jungle. Its way outside the buffer zone as well. Here plantations have been done artificially. We have now put camera traps in the area. We also suspect snake bite to be one of the causes of disappearance,” the Minister said.