A Pilibhit tiger’s letter to humans
Dear humans,
Truth be told, it is not as if we tigers are living a dream life. Our natural habitats have already fallen prey to the reckless human nature. But this last bit, scripted by you in Pilibhit, is really the pits. We are not preying upon your elders and we protest because it is a scathing attack on our dignity and animal pride.
Your charge that we are killing the elders being sent into the Pilibhit reserve by families looking for compensation, is not just incriminating, it also has the unappetising scent of decaying human values. Just because you can't find your fulcrum, you decide to use me as a tool to get your means of survival. This is poverty of the mind. If that be the survival tactics of humans, I am glad I was born an animal.
Superior as you may fathom you are, animals have their own rules to survive and they deem to be less murkier than yours. We do not kill unless we are hungry. If you send in your elders, it does not mean we pounce on them and gobble them up. They will not be attacked unless we see a threat in them.
To make a clean breast of it, let me remind you, we do not barge into your space to kill you for sport. That is what you take pride in.
If it has come to the level of species shaming, let me remind you that the jungle has a law of co-existence that all creatures adhere to. You are the ones busy killing your own, taking law into your own hand, lynching people by the roadside, burning down what you create, and making death a judgmental sport.
Introspect. Look inwards. If you see us as hungry beasts awaiting a frail human body to feast upon, then the ecosystem of the Pilibhit Tiger Reserve must be really at an all-time low. Tigers only attack a human if they cannot physically satisfy their needs otherwise. So please go ahead and audit the reserve’s ecological balance.
In your zest to create controversies, you forget that such insinuation shall endanger us even further. I am sure the way the facts are being doctored and presented, we, in the reserve, would soon be declared as a man-eating lot and hunted down. Needless to say, that does not help our already-dwindling population.
So to this cow-obsessed nation, my only submission is that so far, your assaults have been physical and sometimes fatal. But your projecting us as human-killing beasts and then profiting from it, is below the belt.
In the end, let me leave you with what the wise have left for you...
Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates,
and your cubs as they need, and ye can;
But kill not for pleasure of killing,
and seven times never kill Man!
The Law of the Jungle - from The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling.
Also read: Watch how India crushes its national animal, tiger