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Bahraich: The last one of the pack of six wolves that had created terror in Mahsi tehsil has been killed by the locals in Tamachpur village of Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh. The authorities had launched ‘Operation Bhediya’ to catch a pack of six wolves that had killed eight people and injured more than 20 others since mid-July.
The wolf that was killed by villagers late Saturday night is a female and not lame as suspected earlier. The wolf’s body has been sent for post-mortem.
“Late Saturday night we got information that people had killed a wolf in Tamachpur village under Ramgaon police station of Mahsi tehsil. When we reached there, we found the dead wolf and the bodies of a goat. There were injury marks on the wolf’s body and it was bleeding,” Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) Ajit Pratap Singh told PTI.
“On closer inspection, we found that the dead wolf was an adult female. When we inquired, we found out that the wolf had entered the inhabited area and was carrying away a goat. On the way, the villagers surrounded and killed it. The dead wolf has been brought to the range office for post-mortem,” he added.
When asked whether the killed female wolf was lame or not, the DFO said that “there was never a ‘lame wolf’ in the pack of man-eating wolves”.
Villagers said that the wolf had tried to attack an innocent child sleeping next to his mother in the courtyard of a house in the village, but on hearing the mother’s screams, the wolf ran away and attacked a goat. Later, the villagers surrounded the wolf and beat it to death.
The pack of six wolves that have been terrorising 50 villages in Mahsi tehsil of Bahraich district. At least eight people, including seven children, have died in suspected attacks by these wolves. In the first incident, a 11-year-old girl, who was sleeping with her family in Makupurwa village, was lifted from her bed and dragged by the neck by a wild animal late at night. The family raised an alarm and chased the animal away, forcing it to leave the injured girl behind.
The second incident was reported in Bhavani Pur village, where a 10-year-old girl was dragged off her bed by a wolf around 5 am. The girl’s mother said, “I saw the wolf approaching and we started hitting it with sticks. It left the child and fled.”
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had conducted an aerial inspection of the area earlier on September 15 and met families of those who lost their lives in the recent wolf attacks.
Earlier, experts claimed that viral diseases such as rabies or canine distemper virus could be responsible for the rise in wolf attacks in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich district. According to the International Big Cat Alliance – a multi-country, multi-agency coalition aimed at conserving big cat species and their habitats said that the exact reason can only be determined through a proper analysis of the captured animals, however, viral diseases could be reason behind the attacks.
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