However, we freak out if an animal even tries to come in close proximity to us. It’s understandable since animals can be dangerous, especially if provoked. But no one realizes the fact that animals aren’t coming on our land, we’re encroaching theirs.

And it is this encroachment for which Avni paid a heavy price. The 5-year-old tigress from Maharashtra who was brutally murdered was termed as a ‘man-eating’ tigress, baited and then shot in cold blood. The mother of two cubs, she was reportedly responsible for the death of 13 people. The SC handed out a death sentence to the tigress even though not all the deaths were confirmed to be tiger attacks.

No one seems to care about is that the alleged victims were found deep inside the forest. Which makes it clear that it was the humans who went intruding in animal territory, and not the other way around.

Human beings have been encroaching on animal land since forever. We have caused so much harm to their natural habitat, along with being responsible for wiping out 60% of the wildlife.

With the killing of Avni, we need to accept the fact that we have taken over in a way that our existence is proving fatal for the survival of other species.

Constantly feeling threatened with their natural habitat snatched away from them, what should we expect from animals, anyway?

They need to eat and feed their families too. We take the resources away from them to spread out our own offsprings, leaving them helpless.

Sightings of wild feline creatures is so common near forest areas that we’ve been hearing stories about it since forever. But what no one acknowledges is that it’s because we took what was theirs. They are just trying to survive and at times, end up coming into our civilisation with no fault of their own.

And as far as naming her as a ‘man-eating’ tiger, Jim Corbett once said, 

“It is a tiger that has been compelled through stress of circumstances beyond its control to adopt a diet alien to it. The stress is, in nine cases out of ten, wounds, and in the tenth case, old age. Human beings are not natural prey of tigers, and it is only when tigers have been incapacitated through wounds or old age that, in order to survive, they are compelled to take to a diet of human flesh.”

While it’s understood that we need resources and land to support ourselves too, there is a way to do it. And killing is not the answer. We have endangered so many wildlife species this way, eventually screwing up our whole ecosystem.

If we are the most intelligent species on the planet and have managed to control animals the way we do, there could have been other ways to manipulate this situation. Killing of Avni is morally incorrect and proper procedure was given no importance.

If she was an alleged threat to human civilisation, something should have been done sooner than this. We are capable of a lot of things and capturing a tigress is one of them. Killing her wasn’t the right way to go about this.

We need to start taking responsibility for our actions and not harm our co-inhabitants.