What's Behind Deadly Animal Attacks?

Feb 13, 2014  

Dark reports began circulating in December, after the mutilated body of a 65-year-old man was found in northern India. Since then, nine additional human deaths have been blamed on "Mysterious Queen," the name given to a large Bengal tigress with a taste for human flesh.
The exact identity of the tiger hasn't yet been established — wildlife officials aren't even sure if it's one tiger or two — but that hasn't stopped villagers in India's Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand states from taking extra precautions when venturing outside their homes.
Wildlife attacks like these have been increasing in a few parts of the world, and some experts believe, for a number of reasons, that humans — unaccustomed to being prey — might start appearing on more predators' dinner menus in the future.

The latest tiger-attack victim in India was Ram Charan, a 45-year-old irrigation contractor working near Jim Corbett National Park, a reserve established in 1936 to protect the region's iconic Bengal tigers and other wildlife.
Charan was walking through the forest near his truck when a tiger attacked him, according to news reports. "People rushed to his rescue on hearing his screams," a local wildlife official told the Times of India. "But he was dead by the time they reached him."
The tiger might have attacked a human out of desperation, one local official said. "The animal has started attacking humans, because it is not getting its natural prey," Rupek De, chief wildlife warden of Uttar Pradesh, told the Associated Press. 

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"When I was a boy growing up in Florida during the 1950s, alligators were endangered, and I never saw one outside of a zoo or Everglades National Park," Michael Conover, a wildlife management expert at the Berryman Institute, wrote in a 2008 editorial in the journal Human-Wildlife Conflicts. "Today, alligators are abundant throughout the state."

 Similar success stories with wolves, bears, cougars and other predators have resulted in human-animal encounters that don't always end well for the human. During one deadly week in 2006, three Florida women were killed and partly eaten by alligators in separate incidents.
The month prior to the alligator attacks, a 6-year-old girl in Tennessee was killed by a black bear, which also injured the girl's mother and her 2-year-old brother. As the population of black bears has grown nationwide, a greater number of bear-human conflicts have been reported. [See Photos of the Black Bears' Return] 

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