Most people would have run for their lives. But as the tiger was sinking its claws into her husband’s neck, Mangal grabbed a stick and started fighting.
Moments earlier, the apex predator had leapt from the jungle undergrowth to pin 61-year-old Lilarag to the ground. Yet Mangal had no intention of her husband becoming the big cat’s next meal.
“When he fell down, I couldn’t [run] because I wanted to save Lilarag and the tiger wanted to bite his throat,” the 56-year-old says, nonchalantly recounting her remarkable response to the attack last year. “So I took dry sticks from the forest and hit the tiger again and again.
“I just kept shouting and kept hitting the tiger until it ran away,” she adds, mimicking the motion as she sits on her front porch, watching the sunset. “We saw a very nasty tiger that day.”
Lilarag’s brush with death unfolded in the forest just outside the village where the couple grew up, married, and raised their three children. But venturing into the jungle, where locals have been foraging for decades, is an increasingly dangerous business.
The community backs onto Chitwan National Park, a picturesque reserve of flat grasslands, rich marshes and dense forest in Nepal’s lush Terai lowlands. Roughly 120 miles from Kathmandu, this area is known as the country’s “tiger capital” – and it’s been a linchpin of an impressive conservation programme.
Tiger numbers across Nepal have almost tripled since 2010, when 13 countries home to the big cats marked the Chinese Year of the Tiger with a pledge to double their populations before the zodiac calendar cycled round again. By 2022, Nepal was the only place to hit that target: numbers jumped from 121 to 355 as the government intensified efforts to prevent poaching and protect habitats.
But the Bengal tiger’s comeback has come at a price. According to government data, at least 32 people have been killed and 15 injured in confrontations with the animals since 2018.
And the villages close to Chitwan – the country’s oldest national park, home to a third of Nepal’s tigers – are a hotspot for simmering tensions, as the big cats venture out of the reserve and clash with locals.
“The [Bengal] tiger is a magnificent animal. It’s one of nature’s marvels and we have to protect it, or it could go to extinction,” says Abinash Thapa Magar, a ranger in the national park. “But there are incidents… [we have] to manage rising human-tiger conflict and control the man-eaters.”
Pacing a shabby cage in a jungle clearing is one of these “man eaters”. As the rangers approach, it hurls itself at the rusting mesh with a deep roar. It’s an unnerving moment.
“We think he’s around two years old, he’s been here for two or three months,” says Amrita Pudasaini, a Chitwan park ranger, watching the frustrated, aggressive creature lap its cage. “We have seven in captivity [around Chitwan] at the moment. We have to take man-eating tigers out of the wild, because they can get a taste for humans.”
Once a tiger attacks a human, the likelihood is they’ll strike again. But caging the big cats is a last resort, a measure no one takes lightly.
Not only is it expensive – it costs roughly 7,000 rupees (£40) a day to feed one tiger 10kg of meat, stretching already tight budgets – but none of the rangers want to take the very animal they’re trying to protect out of the wild. Yet they see few alternatives.
“With the increase in tiger population, there has been a surge in the instances of human-tiger conflicts leading to human casualties, livestock losses and retaliations,” says Shashank Poudel, a wildlife biologist at the World Wildlife Fund in Nepal.
“While prevention is key, holding and managing problem tigers is also important for the safety of the people. This is an expensive affair that requires lots of resources. While the government and conservation partners are trying their best… additional resources are imperative to construct improved and better enclosures.”
Chitwan’s Mr Thapa Magar, who estimates five per cent of Nepal’s tigers have “behavioural problems”, agrees.
“We have to capture them, and we have a compensation scheme for the victims [bereaved families receive 1 million rupees, just under £6,000]. The only way to protect the tigers is to also protect the local people and their livestock. Relations have to be harmonious, because we need community support to be successful in conservation.”
He adds that working with locals has been especially critical to tackle poaching and hunting which, alongside habitat loss, first pushed Bengal tigers to an endangered status. A century ago more than 100,000 roamed Asia, a figure that had nosedived by 95 per cent by the early 2000s.
In Nepal the low point came in the early 1970s; government estimates suggest the country was then home to fewer than 50 Bengal tigers. It was around this time that Chitwan National Park became the country’s first protected reserve.
But alongside local people, the rangers have also enlisted another, less obvious ally in their conservation efforts: elephants.
The majestic giants become an essential part of conservation and tracking efforts during Nepal’s relentless rainy season, when Chitwan’s marshlands become saturated, dense grasses reach nine feet high, and the dirt tracks become impassable even for a 4×4.
And so, on a gloomy Friday morning in late August, The Telegraph joins a group of mahouts, rangers and soldiers as they set off on patrol atop four enormous Asian elephants. We’re perched on hessian mats and huddling under brightly coloured umbrellas as a heavy drizzle sets in.
“Sometimes we come across poachers, but that has become less common,” says Ms Pusadaini. Today, the team is on the lookout for injured animals, and taking stock of the landscape for habitat management planning.
And so, for five miles, we precariously sway from side to side as the plodding elephants navigate across deep streams, muddy forests and meadows so tall we’d lose sight of one another, if not for the umbrellas bobbing above the foliage. The mahouts guide the route, jabbing their bare feet into the elephant’s ears and nudging their heads with a blunt machete.
“From the elephant’s point of view, it’s not the best situation, so we don’t use them every day and we make sure to take good care of them,” says Ms Pusadaini. “But we can’t do our jobs without these elephants.”
A moment later, we get a sense of this dynamic. Less than three metres in front of us, a rhino and its calf dash through the grasslands, seemingly from nowhere. “Imagine if that had been a tiger and we had been on foot,” Ms Pusadaini notes.
Today, though, we don’t spot any big cats – and having heard about the various rangers’ encounters, that’s almost a relief.
In 2013, when Mr Thapa Magar was on elephant patrol, his team tracked a troublesome tiger into a sugarcane field. “Suddenly it roared and it jumped towards us. I was so afraid, my internal voice was like ‘woaaaah’. It was a frightening moment,” Mr Thapa Magar recalls later, back at the park’s headquarters. “This is why [elephants] are the backbone of our operations.
“We raise them and train them to help the patrolling and overall management of the park. It is not acceptable to ride them for recreational purposes, but it is essential for the safety of rangers and for operational purposes,” he says. “If we don’t have elephants, we cannot enter much of the national park at this time. Elephants have been important for our success.”
But in the “buffer zone” outside the park, many villagers have mixed feelings about the tiger boom. Dil Bahadur Purja Pun, chief of the Chitwan park rangers, understands their concerns.
“We have no new target [for the tiger population], as we have already tripled their numbers. Now, we have to focus on balancing this, to maintain the population while mitigating conflicts,” he says. “It is quite difficult, but not impossible.”
Lilarag, however, seems unconvinced. “I don’t know if it’s possible to control the tigers”, he says, gesturing at the idyllic landscape in front of his house. Distant mountains tower above rice paddy fields, but he can also see the forest where his wife risked her life to save his own.
“I’ve not been back into the forest since it happened. I’m very scared, I cannot go inside,” says Lilarag, recoiling at the idea.
He doesn’t remember much of the attack; he blacked out as the tiger clawed his face and neck, and woke up disoriented in a hospital ward a week later. He remained there for 15 days as doctors reconstructed his face – his left jaw is now held together with a metal bolt.
“Most people when they encounter a tiger, they’re going to die. But I got another life from my wife,” Lilarag says. “If she had also run, I would have died. So I feel like I have a new life.”
Mangal smiles. They know how different the outcome could have been, several families in their village have lost relatives to the apex predators.
“The tigers come from here, but so do we – our communities have lived here for a very long time,” says Mangal, glancing at the long, jagged scar the tiger claw left on Lilarag’s face. “Sometimes it feels to me too hard to live with tigers beside us.”
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