Poachers Kill, Skin Tigress in Indian Zoo

Poachers broke into a zoo in southern India, killed a tigress and skinned it, Press Trust of India news agency reported Friday.

The poachers killed the one-year-old tigress apparently after drugging it on Wednesday night, said B. Trinadha Rao, conservator of the Nehru Zoological Park in Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh state in the south.

“The animal keeper noticed that the lock of [the] animal house of the tiger park was broken open and the carcass of the tigress was floating in a nearby water tank,” PTI quoted Rao as saying.

Rao said there were bloodstains on the floor of the cubicle where the tigress was caged, suggesting that the poachers had dragged the big cat some distance after killing it. “They skinned the tigress and pulled out two nails from her front paw before throwing the carcass into the drinking water tank.”

Chandrababu Naidu, the top elected official of Andra Pradesh state, ordered a police inquiry into the incident. Four zookeepers were suspended from their jobs pending the inquiry.

Wildlife experts say that Indian agencies are poorly organized for fighting criminal networks that poach tigers and other animals. Most tiger parts are smuggled to China, Japan and Southeast Asian countries, where they are used in traditional medicine and aphrodisiacs.

Wildlife agencies reported big seizures of the skins of tigers, leopards and black bucks in India in 1999.

The agencies recovered 21 tiger skins and 137 nails, 249 leopard skins and 18,000 nails and 221 black buck skins, Minister of State for Environment Babu Lal Marandi told the Indian Parliament in July.

Half the world’s 5,000 to 7,000 tigers live in India, the National Geographic Society estimates, and hundreds have been killed in the last 10 years in the nation’s wildlife sanctuaries.