IWN Daily Digest — Sunday, 27 September 2026
A seven-month-old tiger cub strayed out of the forest and into a villager’s house in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district on Thursday night, setting off a rescue that has forest officials searching for a mother tiger who may have lost track of her cub.
As reported by ThePrint (via PTI):
“Panic gripped a remote village in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district after a tiger cub was found inside a house, officials said on Friday. The incident took place in Khaparakhai village, adjacent to the Similipal National Park, in the Karanjia Forest Division, they said. The tiger cub was spotted inside a cattle shed late Thursday night.”
The cub first turned up in a cattle shed on Jogendra Gagarai’s property, growling loudly enough to raise the alarm. It then slipped into an empty house nearby, and Gagarai’s son shut the door on it before the family called the forest department.
Forest personnel judged the cub too young to be tranquillised, so they set a trap cage by the doorway instead. It walked in on its own and was secured by Friday around noon, according to Similipal Tiger Reserve field director Prakash Chand Gogineni.
“The cub remained inside the unoccupied house until Friday morning,” Gogineni said. “On examination, forest officials found that the cub required veterinary care and rescued it around noon.”
The animal is being treated first at the Thakurmunda range office and then in Baripada, Gogineni said, before moving into a larger enclosure inside Similipal’s core area to build up its hunting skills and, eventually, being released once it can survive on its own.
Missing Mother
Forest staff are now going through camera-trap footage to work out where the mother might be, and whether she has other cubs with her. Cubs this young normally stay with their mother while they learn to hunt, Gogineni said.
Similipal is one of the few reserves in India with a resident population of melanistic, or black, tigers, and that population has come under strain. As Deccan Chronicle reported, three of the reserve’s black tigers have died in suspected poaching cases in recent years, and two black tiger skins seized in March and May led to 17 arrests across two trafficking cases.
Sources: ThePrint (via PTI) · Deccan Chronicle
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