A tiger found dead in Goa with teeth and claws missing. A leopard strangled in a wire snare in Odisha. A lion cub killed on a Gujarat highway. An elephant shot and mutilated at the Assam–Meghalaya border. And in Jharkhand’s Saranda forest, yet another elephant — the sixth in twelve months — dead from a suspected Maoist IED. Five incidents across five species in a single fortnight. Each one stands alone in the local record. Together, they say something that needs to be said plainly.
Goa: a tiger found without its teeth and claws
On 2 May 2026, the highly decomposed carcass of an adult tiger was found at Aglot-Sacorda in Dharbandora, on the outskirts of the Bhagwan Mahavir Wildlife Sanctuary. The remains were scattered across a private forested area and estimated to be approximately fifteen days old. The animal’s teeth and claws were missing.
The Goa Forest Department’s Deputy Conservator, Jiss Varkey, stated prima facie that the death appeared natural, noting that advanced decomposition can cause teeth and claws to detach. A post-mortem was conducted and the report submitted to the state government. Chief Minister Pramod Sawant said he would comment once the department’s findings were available. The forensic report is still awaited.
Environmentalist Rajendra Kerkar disputed the natural-death assessment, calling for a thorough investigation and urging the department to comb the Aglot region for wire snares. He pointed out that this is the sixth recorded tiger death in Goa — a state whose government continues to deny tiger presence in its forests to avoid notification of a Tiger Reserve, a matter currently pending before the Supreme Court. The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), which had probed a 2020 incident in which a tigress and four cubs were poisoned in Goa, had at the time warned that the failure to declare a tiger reserve could make the state a death trap for tigers.
Subsequent reporting indicated that wild dogs were being investigated as a possible cause of death — a lead that has not yet been officially confirmed.
Odisha: a leopard in a wire snare
On the night of 12 May 2026, an adult male leopard — estimated to be between eight and ten years old — strayed out of the Kuldiha Wildlife Sanctuary in Balasore district and entered the Kathagochhi reserve forest under the Nilagiri forest range. By early morning on 13 May, local residents heard the animal’s distressed growls and found it trapped in an illegal wire snare in the Mitrapur section of the forest. Despite the forest department’s efforts to rescue the animal, the leopard died from its injuries before it could be freed.
DFO Prafulla Kumar Mallik confirmed that the snare had been laid illegally, most likely by poachers targeting wild boar or bushmeat — the leopard an unintended victim of a non-selective trap. A Joint Task Force and Special Task Force have been deployed to investigate. A three-member veterinary team conducted a post-mortem at the site; the carcass was subsequently buried in the forest.
The incident follows a pattern of leopard deaths in Odisha in recent months. In December 2025, a juvenile female leopard was poisoned in a retaliatory killing in Sundargarh district. In January 2026, a leopard was stabbed to death by a man it had attacked at a farmhouse in Cuttack district. The Balasore death is the third big cat loss in the state in under six months.
Gujarat: a lion cub on a highway
On the night of 13 May 2026, a one-year-old Asiatic lion cub was struck and killed by a vehicle on the Bhavnagar–Somnath National Highway near Dantardi village in Rajula taluka, Amreli district. The cub was attempting to cross the road when it was hit. The driver, subsequently identified through CCTV footage as Indarsingh Rawat, a 27-year-old resident of Rajasthan, did not stop after the incident. He was arrested by forest authorities; his vehicle was seized. The case has been registered under the Wildlife Protection Act.
The Bhavnagar–Somnath highway runs through the Saurashtra region, which forms the dispersal range of Gir’s expanding Asiatic lion population. As lions have extended their range across nine districts of Gujarat, encounters with road traffic have become an increasingly documented cause of mortality. The cub’s death has renewed calls for dedicated underpasses, speed controls, and wildlife crossing infrastructure on roads running through lion habitat.
Assam–Meghalaya border: an elephant shot and mutilated
On 13 May 2026, a male wild elephant was found shot dead in the Dikchak hills under the Topatoli Beat of the Sonapur Forest Range, in the remote forest belt along the Assam–Meghalaya border. The animal bore two bullet wounds to the head. Its trunk had been severed by the poachers. Local residents in the area had heard gunshots from the hills in the early morning hours, and a herd of elephants was seen fleeing the area in distress shortly after.
Forest officials launched a search operation and recovered the carcass later that day. Local residents and forest officials suspect that the poachers entered through forest routes connected to the Meghalaya side — a concern that has been raised repeatedly in connection with earlier incidents in the same area. No arrests had been made at the time of reporting. An investigation has been launched.
The Sonapur Forest Range along the Assam–Meghalaya border has seen multiple elephant poaching incidents in recent years. In March 2025, a pregnant elephant was found killed and partially butchered for meat in the same range. The pattern of targeted poaching in this interstate forest belt — where coordinated enforcement between two state departments is structurally difficult — reflects a persistent and unresolved vulnerability.
Jharkhand: Saranda’s elephants and the IED problem
The Saranda forest in Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum district — one of the largest sal forest tracts in Asia and a significant elephant habitat — has seen six elephants die over the past twelve months as a direct or indirect consequence of Maoist improvised explosive devices (IEDs) laid in the forest to target security forces. The most recently confirmed death involved a six-year-old elephant that had been found wandering the Saranda forest with catastrophic injuries to its front right foot — toes blown off, deep tissue exposed — consistent with injuries seen in previous IED-affected animals in the same area. After ten days of treatment involving forest department teams from both Jharkhand and Odisha, and a specialist team from the Vantara rehabilitation centre in Gujarat, the animal could not be saved.
The Saranda Divisional Forest Officer, Aviroop Sinha, has noted that the IED wounds in the affected elephants follow a consistent pattern: explosive devices concealed under forest paths, originally placed to ambush security force convoys, are detonated by the weight of passing elephants. The forest department and police have intensified patrolling to detect and clear remaining explosive hazards, but the dense canopy and active insurgency in parts of Saranda make systematic clearance difficult.
Six elephants in twelve months — from a forest that is also a Schedule I protected landscape — is a figure that has received almost no national policy attention. The deaths sit at the intersection of two separate crises: left-wing extremism and wildlife conservation. Neither agency responsible for one crisis has formal authority over the other.
A fortnight in the record
These five incidents occurred across six states, involved four of India’s most legally protected species, and included poaching, road mortality, snaring, and conflict-zone contamination. None of them are outliers. All of them reflect patterns that have been documented, reported, and flagged — in some cases for years. The Goa tiger reserve petition has been before the courts for years. The Bhavnagar–Somnath highway has killed lions before. Wire snares in Odisha’s reserve forests are a known and recurring problem. The Assam–Meghalaya border has seen repeated elephant poaching. The Saranda IED problem has been reported since at least mid-2025.
What changes is the fortnight. What does not change is the pattern.
IWN will continue tracking wildlife crime and road mortality incidents across India. Verified incident reports and documentation can be sent to IWN at indiawildlifenews.com/contact-us/
Sources: O Heraldo / The Goan (Goa tiger) · Odisha Bytes / Hans India (Balasore leopard) · Devdiscourse / DeshGujarat (Gujarat lion cub) · Assam Tribune (Sonapur elephant) · Vantara / Counter-IED Report (Saranda IED elephants)