Haunting Film Explores Interface Between Tigers, People in Sundarbans

"Deep in the Sundarbans, a vast mangrove maze where the Ganges and two other great rivers weave their way to the coast in India and Bangladesh, the big-cat conservationist Alan Rabinowitz plays a video clip on his laptop for a cluster of men and women in an impoverished village where tigers — in one of their last big refuges — regularly kill or maim people scouring the shorelines for meager hauls of fish and crabs.

They watch, rapt, as residents of another village snare a tiger cornered in a hut and beat and hack it to death. Through an interpreter, Rabinowitz asks what the scene makes them feel. One man immediately shouts, “Euphoria!”

Rabinowitz then asks them if they would want the mangrove forests empty of tigers.

As quickly, they respond with a definitive no. Without the tigers, there would be nothing to prevent wildlife poachers and other outsiders from threatening their meager livelihood."

Andrew C. Revkin reports in Dot Earth for the New York Times November 17, 2015.