A Terrible Case Of Mistaken Identity That Could Have Been Fatal For This Family

Pilibhit: This particular case of mistaken identity could have proved to be too costly for Jagdish Prasad and his family. On Wednesday morning as they were huddled together around a warm bonfire in Mallpur Khajuria, a village 30km from Pilibhit, awaiting their boiling tea, a tiger quietly slipped into their house under the cover of the dense fog that morning. The family thought it was just a stray dog…

The family members did not realise how wrong they were about the dog, until after a while, it roared; scrambling everyone in the house to their feet and had them run for their lives!

The family managed to lock the tiger in the room before reaching for help. Kailash Prakash, divisional forest officer of Pilibhit tiger reserve (PTR), rushed to the spot and tried to set up a cage with a goat as bait to lure the tiger inside. However, when their efforts failed, he requisitioned for a tranquiliser dart shooter.

The rescue operation that lasted for over an hour and a half finally ended with the tiger being moved to the Mustafabad forest rest house, from where it would eventually be moved to its home forest range in Pilibhit.

According to the forest officials, the tiger, a male, was only about two-years-old and having recently been separated from his mother was not able to differentiate between the forest and the crops that were on the edge of the human habitat where it had come to that morning.

For Jagdish Prasad and his family however, the incident will remain etched in their memories, when a wild cat strayed into their house for tea on a cold and foggy morning.