Tiger with wildboar kill

I had photographed this in Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve. Wild boar is one of their favourite food.

Canon EOS 10D, Canon EF 300mm F4 L IS USM, ISO 100, f4, 1/90, full frame image.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

Beautiful eye contact. You seem to be real close to them. Would have loved if you could have got some more space in the bottom to include the legs. Sharp image. Any more in the series?

Nice image Sabyasachi, agree with Mrudul for some more space at the bottom. I see another tiger in the BG, would love to see more from this series.

Something cute about its expression. was it a cub?

Yes. It was a cub. They were four adolescents and it was a sight to watch them. You can see one in the background.

One of the four later on had killed a cow on the periphery. A 15 year old boy who had gone to search the cow had stumbled into him and was killed. The tiger was then tanquilised and transferred to the Bhopal zoo.

Sad story... Thankfully it wasn't branded as a man eater and shot as earlier. But still being sent to a zoo is just as good as it being dead, living its life within the confines of metal. People must understand that such cases are not those of man eaters but of man-tiger conflict due to overlapping or coinciding habitats. Also a single stray incident should never be taken as a yardstick especially when we have less than a thousand of these creatures left in the wild...

There is a fight to flight distance. If you go much closer ie. surprise it, the tiger or for that matter any wild animal will take you as the aggressor and attack you. And if that happens with a tiger, in some cases, the tiger may approach the victim later and may eat a portion of the leg from the groin area. That is completely natural and the tiger should not be branded as maneater. Unfortunately, our foresters have no clue about animal behaviour and immediately brand the tiger as maneater and kill or send it to zoo.

Incarceration in a zoo breaks its spirit and is akin to killing it. Am all for freedom. It was born free. Let it roam free.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi