terai is a mind boggling region that has certain remote locations which still fall in the postneolithic age here wildlife predators and humans share a symbiotic relationship following the golden rule of live and let live however during the early 80s some troubled pockets emerged in the sugarcane fields of terai familiarity bred contempt and the tigers sensed that obtaining a kill from humans requires almost zero energyto avert fatal encounters and save both people and tigers former member of state wildlife advisory board and honorary wildlife warden of kishanpurdudhwa national park 19972003 rahul shukla came up with a campaign saving men from tigers which helped in salvaging the situation to a great extentstories of conflictshukla whose 40 years of field research on farmdwelling tigers has given him much insight into their behaviour on human landscape says that during the early 80s when his sugarcane tiger research was at a nascent stage a maneating pandemic had erupted all over terai and agrarian fields around dudhwa were its epicentre the official death toll of humans and tigers was around 200 and 30 respectively while unofficially it was 400 and 50humans had resorted to an appalling series of reprisals tigers carcasses were being found poisoned lying next to domestic stockeven my native trackers who had assisted me tirelessly in gathering seasonwise data on sugarcane tigers suddenly developed antipathy there was not a single person in my team whose at least one acquaintance or relative had not fallen victim to big cats shukla remarksi travelled to 16 villages in bahraich and 22 hamlets in lakhimpur kheri to understand the lives of tigerhounded people it reminded me of my boyhood when i was 11 years old and my two maternal uncles were killed by tigers i had witnessed the pain of my family he recallsin deepnagar village near dudhwa with the news of a farmer killed by a tiger sabbal singh an amli sikh was last seen with his arms wrapped around a big cats neck while pointed sabers were embedded in his shoulders with my 375 magnum in my hands i set out to recover the body the 400mt long drag led us to the kill lying in a fallow field literally chopped into cat chow we brought the body and cremated it he saysduring investigations of bammhanpurs sugarcane tigers in kheri he encountered themother of a tiger victim raj rani she said people dont live there they survive she recalled that the tiger roared from the wheat khet and appeared as if it was angry with the whole world he saysin pasiapur village a man kauwa khan had been killed by a tiger an old poacher ramdeen told me that the tiger could bring down a sixhundredpound neelgai with just one bite it wasted no time in dealing with kauwa he saysin jamunaiya khas in pilibhit a tiger had crushed a mans skull and his dead body lay behind a hut for three days foul odour permeated the area but people lacked