Deaths of 13 Tigers a Mystery, Despite Probe

Busloads of raucous villagers pour in to gawk at the tigers pacing in their enclosures. Some throw paper balls at them. Others shout friendly insults.

It’s business as usual at the Nandankanan Zoological Park, home to India’s largest collection of rare animals. But all isn’t as it should be.

The park drew world attention in July after 12 Royal Bengal tigers died, eight of them within a few hours of each other. A 13th died a few weeks later. Nine of the dead animals were rare white cats, mutated versions of the Royal Bengal.

Five months later, government investigations are over, media attention has waned and visitors are back. But no one knows why the tigers died or who was responsible.

“We do not have a clear report on what happened. The whole thing is bizarre because this disease doesn’t take such a big toll,” Manoj Mishra of the World Wildlife Fund in India said, referring to sleeping sickness, a disease that zoo officials had said afflicted the tigers.

The government initially said the tigers died of stress caused by a supercyclone that hit the coast of southeastern Orissa state nine months before, killing more than 10,000 people.

Three days later, the cause of death was announced as trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, a disease carried by tsetse flies. Then experts at the government’s Pathological Laboratory in the eastern city of Calcutta said the deaths were caused by eating decomposed and contaminated beef.

Wildlife experts said the tigers died because they were injected with Berenil, a drug used to cure trypanosomiasis in non-carnivorous animals. Veterinarians say Berenil should be used only after blood tests have confirmed the presence of the disease.

No blood tests were conducted, zoo doctors admit, and 17 tigers were injected with Berenil, but officials say it is the correct treatment for sleeping sickness. Twelve tigers died within hours of the injections; the rest survived after falling violently ill and being treated by a visiting team of veterinarians.

The previous highest death toll among captive tigers was eight over a two-week period at a zoo in Mysore in southern India in 1978.

Animal welfare groups charge that the veterinarians in charge of the zoo had no specialization in wildlife diseases. One of the zoo doctors at the time of the tiger deaths had never worked in a zoo before, the Wildlife Society of Orissa said.

Zoo workers refuse to talk about the incident, saying they fear for their jobs. The zoo director was not available for comment, and his deputy refused to talk to the Associated Press.

“The government did a massive cover-up job because some powerful bureaucrats were involved,” said Biswajit Mohanty, secretary of the Wildlife Society of Orissa.

Wildlife activists suggested the highest zoo official had directed doctors to inject the tigers against veterinarians’ advice.

Mohanty, a passionate conservationist, said responsibility could be easily assessed if a proper investigation was carried out. But he and many other people in the state capital, Bhubaneswar, said the government didn’t want such a probe.

Two days after the deaths were reported, a federal team arrived in Bhubaneswar in the wake of an uproar in Parliament and a Supreme Court order for an investigation. The team eventually declared no one was to blame for the deaths.

Drug experts waited hours at Nandankanan Zoo to get a sample of the medicine used on the tigers, only to be told that there was not enough left for testing. The carcasses of the dead tigers were cremated before the federal team arrived. Zoo officials said that was to keep the skins from being sold on the black market.

The zoo housed 56 Royal Bengal tigers, including 32 whites, before the deaths began. The National Geographic Society estimates that only 5,000 to 7,000 tigers exist in the wild today, about half in India.

Sampat Mahapatra, a reporter for the private STAR TV channel, was one of the first people to hear that tigers were dying at Nandankanan. He rushed to the zoo.

“Two tigers died in front of me. They were struggling for breath, panting, drooling and foaming at the mouth,” Mahapatra said. “It was so painful to see the magnificent beasts having convulsions on the ground.”

He said zoo workers told him the tigers were suffering from jaundice and were given medication on empty stomachs.

“It is apparently a problem of the wrong diagnosis and the wrong medications,” Mahapatra said. “Most of the 10 perished within 12 hours.”

The federal investigators’ report called the tiger deaths “a tragedy beyond human control.” The team did not fix responsibility for the deaths.

“The expert committee is not here to conduct any probe but to ensure measures that shall result in better management of the zoo in the future,” said P.R. Sinha, a zoo official who led the team.

Animal rights activists complained that all but one of the team’s members were serving bureaucrats, and the sole private member had retired as head of the Hyderabad Zoo six months before.

“Even if the entire tiger population of Nandankanan Zoo would have been exterminated, we doubt if any person would have been held guilty,” Mohanty said.

Internet Tiger Activists:

https://www.savetigers.org/index2.html

Tiger’s Paw: https://www.tigerspaw.org