A five-year-old male tiger, translocated from Ranthambore to Sariska in June 2008, on Monday was found dead within the Sariska Tiger Sanctuary by a team of Rajasthan forest officials on the trail of another four-year-old tiger “missing” since Friday.
The ambitious project to revive Sariska’s tiger population, which lost all its tigers by 2005, began in June 2008 when a tiger was translocated from Ranthambore National Park (RNP) to Sariska in a helicopter. Since then, five tigers have been translocated from RNP to Sariska.
Rajasthan Chief Wildlife Warden and Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (PCCF) R N Mehrotra maintained it was too early to determine how the tiger, ST-1, died. “After preliminary investigations, we believe this may have been the result of a territorial fight, but we will know for certain only after the post-mortem,” he said, adding that the loss of a tiger in Sariska was a setback to the project.
Read related article in the Open magazine — Dispatched to die.
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