Ravenous Tigers invade villages, kill three
Pastor Dale Morgan
*Ravenous Tigers invade villages, kill three*
From correspondents in Khulna, Bangladesh
June 26, 2007 08:32pm
Article from: Reuters
TIGERS straying into villages around Bangladesh's Sundarbans mangrove
forests have killed three people and some 50 cattle over the last 15
days, forest officials said today.
Police, forest guards and volunteers have been engaged to guard villages
by igniting bonfires to stop the ferocious predators.
Forest officials said the tigers might have strayed into villages in
search of food, which is becoming scarcer in the Sundarbans because of
deforestation and human encroachment.
About three million people live in and around the Bangladesh part of the
6,000-sq km mangrove swamps.
The Forest Ministry said after conducting a tiger census in the wetlands
in 2005 that only around 400 tigers are left in the Bangladesh part of
the Sundarbans.
The Sundarbans mangrove swamps, which stretches into India's eastern
state of West Bengal, is about 400km southwest of Dhaka and home to a
wide variety of wildlife.
But its chief attraction are the tigers.
It forms a fragile ecosystem that is being ravaged by the pressures of
population and weak enforcement of environmental regulations.
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