A 34-year-old Indonesian construction worker was mauled to death by a Sumatran tiger on Saturday (10 March) in the latest violent encounter between humans and this species endangered by urban expansion.
Worker Yusri Effendi was attacked in the evening in the Indragiri Hilir district of the Sumatran province of Riau after he and a colleague had waited two hours for the animal to leave the site.
Indonesia is home to just 400 Sumatran tigers, which are increasingly under threat as deforestation shrinks their jungle habitat. Seeking food, the animals roam into villages or plantations, sparking conflict with humans.
In January a woman working at a palm oil plantation was mauled to death some 20km from where Effendi was killed, reports the Associated Press (AP) news agency.
Local police chief Muhammad Rafi said Effendi and three colleagues were working when they saw the tiger under a building, AP reports.
They waited for about two hours for the tiger to leave, but when they set out on foot they came face-to-face with the tiger, which attacked Effendi as his colleagues ran away.
Later, fellow workers and villagers found Effendi alive but unconscious in undergrowth by a river, but he subsequently died due to bleeding from a wound on his neck.
AP comments: "Sumatran tigers are the most critically endangered tiger subspecies. About 400 remain, down from 1,000 in the 1970s, because of forest destruction and poaching."
Image: A Sumatran tiger, not in the Sumatran rainforest, but in Rotterdam Zoo (Dick Mudde/Wikimedia Commons)
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This is my soap box moment!
Sadly we as humans are to blame for the site worker being attacked.
Ironically, did we ask permission from the Tigers to destroy their home and living environment!
Who gives us the right to enter their territory?
We need to rethink about how we are looking after our planet and all that share it.
When its gone its gone forever!!