by Alessandro Sala
After eight years in captivity, the cat roamed outside of Johannesburg, one of South Africa’s most populous provinces. The hub of farms that raise big cats to supply zoos around the world
A Bengal tiger has been killed on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. The animal had been wanted for several days since it managed to escape from the farm it was raised on. When the tiger was spotted and shot down, it had just returned from a fatal attack on a dog on a farm also home to six families. The danger to humans has become too great, Mandy Gresham, a local community representative who took part in the hunting trip, told AFP. We had no choice but to eliminate it. In recent days, the cat had already killed other dogs and a deer, and also attacked a 39-year-old man who managed to survive.
The story’s epilogue, as it turned out, was perhaps inevitable. But at the beginning of this article we have to come full circle: a Bengal tiger. The name alone suggests that it is not an animal native to the area. Bengal is located several thousand kilometers from South Africa on the Indian subcontinent, partly on Bangladesh, and also involves an ocean, the Indian. The Panthera tigris tigris, that is the scientific name of the royal Bengal tiger or Indian tiger, one of the six subspecies of tigers that still exist in nature (with the Siberian, the Sumatran, the Malayan, the Indochinese and the One of southern China), while three others – those of the Caspian Sea, those of Java and those of Bali – are now extinct. The tiger in all its forms is an endangered specimen anyway: the reduction of habitats and the indiscriminate hunting of its skin and other body parts (teeth and more, considered a panacea in oriental medicine) have greatly reduced the number of specimens . The Indian tiger, for example, is estimated to be no more than 4,000 specimens in the wild, distributed notably between India, Burma and Nepal.
Hence the explanation of why there was a breeding farm on the outskirts of a South African metropolis: to meet the great demand for these animals from zoos around the world (but the chronicles also often report big cats found in private homes, especially the criminal one scrub). In short, commercial activities, certainly not conservation projects. The country, AFP always reminds, has no official census of the tiger population, but according to animal rights NGO Four Paws, almost 10% of the world’s population (or 359 specimens) were exported between 2011 and 2020.
To make matters worse, the breeding took place in an urbanized area: if an animal raised in captivity manages to escape, it inevitably has to deal with the search for food that no one can provide it with anymore. And inhabited areas with domestic and livestock have a very strong attraction. For this reason, the South African Society for the Protection of Animals (Nspca) has defined the decision to keep tigers in residential areas as dangerous and irresponsible. Also irresponsible was the gesture of the reckless one, who, by cutting part of the fence, enabled the escape of Sheba – that’s what the tiger is called – who was running around for the first time in eight years of life in one of the most populated provinces in South Africa. Helicopters and drones were deployed for four days to search for it, and dozens of police officers, local volunteers and animal rights activists were mobilized, the latter keen to find a non-bloody solution. But that was not the case.
Jan 18, 2023 (change Jan 18, 2023 | 3:46 p.m.)
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