Tigers invade villages, kill three
From correspondents in Khulna, Bangladesh
June 26, 2007

TIGERS straying into villages around Bangladesh's Sundarbans mangrove forests have killed three people and some 50 cattle over the last 15 days, forest officials said today.
Police, forest guards and volunteers have been engaged to guard villages by igniting bonfires to stop the ferocious predators.

Forest officials said the tigers might have strayed into villages in search of food, which is becoming scarcer in the Sundarbans because of deforestation and human encroachment.

About three million people live in and around the Bangladesh part of the 6,000-sq km mangrove swamps.

The Forest Ministry said after conducting a tiger census in the wetlands in 2005 that only around 400 tigers are left in the Bangladesh part of the Sundarbans.

The Sundarbans mangrove swamps, which stretches into India's eastern state of West Bengal, is about 400km southwest of Dhaka and home to a wide variety of wildlife.

But its chief attraction are the tigers.

It forms a fragile ecosystem that is being ravaged by the pressures of population and weak enforcement of environmental regulations.

More likely villagers have invaded forests normally occupied in the past by tigers, than the other way round.

Their was a program on cable tv about this some time ago ,and evidently its been going on for ages, Tigers in the Sundurbans have always had an appetite for humans ,even after wearing silly plastic human face masks on the back of their heads, the Tigers wised up that it was fake, and continued lunching into the Sunderban locals, evidently humans have always been on the Tiger menu there, and this is nothing new humans are the preferred meat dish in this region even when they are in a boat, Tigers in the water have pulled people to theirs deaths !

I guess the cows need to get on the eat more chicken comersials there.They need more tigers and less people in my opinion.