Before I came to work I was watching a program on Discovery channel about tigers over in India. The name of the of the park they were talking about was called Sunderbans, people who live close by have to enter the park to fish and collect honey so they can eke out an existence. The villages in this area do not have any running water or electricity so the giant mangrove forest is their main source to gather food.

There is one big problem in this area and that the tigers that live there. They do not fear man and about 80 people a year are falling victim to these beasts. The scientist have been looking at the records and from the 1800’s to the 1900’s they figure that 350,000 people have been killed by these tigers. That is an amazing number when you think of it whole villages were wiped out by tigers. Then people starting killing tigers and they stopped hunting man at that point probably because the tigers started to fear man and learned to leave us alone. However because the Sunderbans are a giant mangrove forest they could not cull the tigers there and therefore they did learn from this experience. That is the theory anyway.

The tigers swim from one small island to another in their search for food and even attack fishermen in their boats and drag them into the forest. There is one area that is off limits to everybody but government officials. They patrol the area trying to keep people out because of the large amount of tigers in that area, which makes it for a highly dangerous area. The last time a bunch of fishermen snuck in there a tiger attacked their boat and killed three people before they escaped. So much for killing people for food hunh? Killing three in one fail swoop kind of rules that out of the equation doesn’t it?

So indeed these are the last animals that actively will hunt and kill humans. Scary when you stop and think of it, seems the best idea would be to stay out of the area and let them be. I know that is not going to happen man is going to encroach on their territory and the death toll will rise until it ends with people staying out of the area or they kill off the tigers or at least figure out a way of making them wary of men. Got too go and get too work talk to you all later have a good weekend everybody!