IWN Report — Friday, 8 May 2026

The laboratory results from the School of Wildlife Forensic and Health in Jabalpur are in. Tigress T-141 and her four cubs, who died across nine days in April at the Sarhi range of Kanha Tiger Reserve, were killed by canine distemper virus.

The diagnosis closes one question. It opens several others.

CDV is not a new threat to India’s tigers. The National Tiger Conservation Authority has known about it for years. In December 2020, NTCA released a Standard Operating Procedure for managing stray and feral dogs in tiger reserves — a document specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of outbreak. The SOP mandates that any stray animals within a five-kilometre radius of a tiger reserve must be vaccinated against canine distemper. It specifies that feral dogs captured from inside a reserve must never be released back. It describes transmission pathways, decontamination procedures, and escalation protocols.

The policy exists. Five tigers died anyway. The question is not what CDV is. The question is why the policy didn’t hold.

How the virus reaches a tiger

CDV spreads when stray dogs feed on prey killed by tigers. Tigers rarely consume an entire carcass at one sitting — they return to the kill over several days. During that window, a stray dog can feed on the carcass, leave saliva carrying the virus, and the tiger ingests it on its return. Forest officials at Kanha have confirmed this transmission pattern is the most likely route in the T-141 case.

The disease itself is merciless. It is highly contagious, targets the respiratory, gastrointestinal, and nervous systems, and once a tiger is infected, there is no treatment. The entire family was lost in under a fortnight. T-141 and her final surviving cub, both found in critical condition, were brought into quarantine at the Mukki facility but died on 29 April.

The deaths bring Madhya Pradesh’s tiger fatality count to 27 in 2026 so far — a number that includes territorial fights, natural causes, and electrocution cases, with this CDV outbreak representing the first confirmed viral cluster this year.

The gap between SOP and practice

The NTCA’s 2020 SOP was a response to precisely this vulnerability. Feral dogs have been detected in camera traps in the majority of India’s 54 tiger reserves, according to the Wildlife Institute of India‘s Status of Tigers, Co-predators and Prey in India 2018 report. The document describes free-ranging dogs as a threat not just as disease vectors but as direct predators of ungulates, competing for prey the tiger depends on.

The SOP has faced criticism since its release. Experts from Wildlife Conservation Society India and veterinary researchers have pointed out that the document focuses narrowly on CDV and rabies, ignoring other zoonotic diseases. More fundamentally, vaccination coverage of free-ranging dog populations is not a one-time exercise — dogs have a high turnover rate, meaning vaccinations have to be consistent, regular, and systematic to maintain meaningful coverage. As researchers have noted, you cannot catch free-ranging dogs at the rate required to break the disease transmission cycle unless there is a coordinated approach.

That coordinated approach — across state forest departments, local veterinary services, and the communities whose dogs move in and out of reserve fringes — is precisely what the SOP calls for. Whether it was being implemented at the required frequency around Kanha’s Sarhi range is the question neither the forest department nor NTCA has yet publicly answered.

The post-Kanha response

Since the deaths, other tiger reserves in Madhya Pradesh have intensified their vaccination drives. The Deputy Director of Panna Tiger Reserve has confirmed that what was previously an annual vaccination exercise is now being conducted in mission mode. Kuno National Park, where four cheetahs are held ahead of their transfer to Nauradehi, has initiated precautionary dog vaccinations in surrounding villages. Officials at Satpura Tiger Reserve are now counting and vaccinating dogs in addition to the cattle vaccination that previously dominated their disease prevention work.

What is notable about all of these responses is their reactive character. The SOP set out the proactive approach. The proactive approach was, evidently, not sufficient.

The Gir comparison

This is not the first time CDV has struck a big cat population in India. In September 2018, a CDV outbreak emerged in the Asiatic lion population at Gir in Gujarat — a species far more vulnerable than the tiger because of its extreme geographic concentration. More than two dozen lions died. That outbreak prompted a national review of CDV threat protocols. That review produced the 2020 NTCA SOP.

Six years later, five tigers are dead in Kanha and other reserves are scrambling to vaccinate dogs that should, by the SOP’s own terms, already have been covered.

What it will take

Wildlife experts are consistent on the requirements: a resident veterinarian at every tiger reserve rather than the ad-hoc arrangements that currently prevail; systematic disease surveillance rather than forensic investigation after death; and a coordinated, state-funded programme for dog vaccination across buffer zone communities around every protected area. None of this is technically novel. All of it costs money and requires institutional continuity that annual government budgets rarely guarantee.

India will host 95 big cat range countries in New Delhi next month to sign the Delhi Declaration on big cat conservation. The declaration is expected to articulate shared priorities for habitat, transboundary cooperation, and species recovery. Whether it will say anything about the domestic dogs that move through the forests of the subcontinent — and carry the virus that killed five tigers in nine days at Kanha — remains to be seen.

Sources: NTCA SOP on Stray and Feral Dogs in Tiger Reserves, 2020 · The Print · Free Press Journal · The Wire Science · Mongabay India · Wildlife Institute of India