On March 13, 2012, it was reported that an Amur tiger was holding people in Tumnin village (Russia, Khabarovsky krai) in abject fear. According to local experts, for the second time this year a tiger has been sighted near this human settlement. The striped predators have never been observed near Tumnin village before, but for some obscure reason they are now attracted to this area which is located further north from the northern border of their historic range.
The animal strayed into the village once in three days looking for domesticated dogs. Two families have already become panic-stricken after the tiger carried out several attacks on their dogs. The villagers managed to measure tiger tracks. Its pad width is 11.5 cm.
Probably, the tracks were left by an orphaned tiger cub that lost its mother in January 2012. A tigress was reportedly killed by a beekeeper, 110 km from Vysokogorny village. Later, it was proved that the man had acted in legitimate self-defense. An autopsy also showed that the female tiger that attacked the beekeeper turned out to have been injured before their encounter.
According to local biologists and wildlife managers, for some reasons nowadays Amur tigers are driven from their usual habitat further north. There have been even a few records of human death caused by tigers there. For example, in the 1980s, a tiger roamed in Ulchsky district and killed a man. That tiger was shot to death afterwards. In January 2010, a tiger wandered along the cost of Strait of Tartary, Nikolaevsky district, about 200 km north of Siziman Bay, and killed a dog leashed on a porch of a lightkeeper’s house. All family members including kids were scared to death and tried to get through to proper agencies asking to help them. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. The tiger’s fate is still unknown.
The villagers of Tumnin are hopeful that tiger specialists will help them to solve the problem with the conflict tiger and avoid tragedy.
