An Indian man is presumed dead after he was snatched from his boat by a Bengal tiger and then dragged into the forest. The man had been fishing with his children in the Sunderbans National Park near Kolkata on Thursday.
The tiger attack underscores the uneasy and dangerous balance between the millions of the poor trying to squeeze out a living in India's forests and rivers and the shrinking, but deadly predators whose numbers have been dropping off dramatically because of poaching,
according to The Associated Press.
Jyotish Manjhi told The Associated Press that he, his father Sushil Manjhi and his sister were crab fishing along a stream in the national park when the attack happened on Thursday. He told the AP the tiger jumped on their boat and snatched up his father with its jaws.
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"I was stunned, and my body froze," Jyotish Manjhi told the
Times of India about the incident. "All I saw a flash of yellow. It took me a moment to register the gruesome sight before me. My father was completely buried under the beast. I could only see his legs thrashing about. I shook off my numbness and grabbed a stick. Molina, too, took out a long cutter we use to clear foliage in the jungle. Together, we poked and battered the tiger, but it refused to give up."
Jyotish Manjhi told the AP that the tiger dragged their father away into the jungle once it reached land.
Earlier in June,
a 62-year-old man on a boat with his family was snatched by a large crocodile in Kakadu National Park in Australian and police later found human remains inside one of two crocs shot afterwards in the area – a 15-foot, 5-inch saltwater crocodile.
The Sunderbans is one of the largest national parks in India for the Bengal tiger. The attack on Manjhi was the fourth assault by a tiger this year, wildlife officials there told the AP. India has more than half of the 3,200 tigers still believed to be in the wild, but booming development in the country is quickly shrinking their habitats.
National Geographic reported in February that the illegal wildlife trade, which includes, tigers, elephants, rhinos and other species generate $19 billion annually on the black market.
"Tigers are walking gold, worth a fortune on the black market," Sharon Guynup wrote in a series of articles. "The bones are smuggled almost exclusively to China, used in tiger bone wine – a pricey traditional Chinese medicine tonic thought to impart the tiger's great strength and vigor. But almost every part of the tiger is valued in (traditional Chinese medicine)."
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