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Face Masks Fool the Bengal Tigers

Face Masks Fool the Bengal Tigers
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September 5, 1989, Section C, Page 4Buy Reprints
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FOR the moment, the Bengal tiger has met its match in the two-faced human.

That finding was a matter of life or death in an experiment being conducted in the Ganges Delta in India, where tigers living under protection in a reserve had been killing about 60 people a year.

Arguing that this predator only attacks people from behind, workers in the mangrove forests started wearing face masks on the backs of their heads. Thus far the trick appears to have worked.

''For the past three years, no one wearing a mask has been killed,'' said Peter Jackson, chairman of the cat specialist group of the World Conservation Union. ''Tigers have been seen following people wearing the mask, but they have not attacked.''

By contrast, 29 people who were not wearing the masks were killed there in the last 18 months, officials reported.

Mr. Jackson, who was in Rome for a meeting of the conservation union's Species Survival Commission last month, brought an example of the trick that fooled the tiger: an inexpensive, rubber mask of a pale-faced human with a thin mustache. He said the Indian Forestry Service has issued more than 2,500 masks to workers who are among the 8,000 who get permits to go into the Sundarban Tiger Reserve. Stopping to Pray

No one lives in the reserve of mangrove forests, cut by rivers and creeks on the border of Bangladesh and India, said Mr. Jackson, who knows the area well. But people on both sides go in to collect fish, wild honey and wood in the tigers' habitat.

Often they first stop to pray for protection at little shrines that rim the area because the large Bengal tigers are unusually fierce. While tigers elsewhere often ignore humans, the Sundarban big cat may attack on sight. Local people tell stories of how the tigers even swim out and sneak up on fishermen in their boats.

Since 1973, when the reserve was formed, scientists and forestry workers have tried to find ways to coexist peacefully with the 500 or so tigers and to stop them from thinking of humans as easy prey. They have put up human-shaped dummies of bamboo and mud, dressed in clothes with human scent and attached to electric wires, for example. Fences have been wired, and the tigers have been heard to scream from the electric shocks.

But it was a student at the Science Club of Calcutta who came up with the idea of using a human mask. The reasoning, Mr. Jackson explained, was that many species use a similar technique to fool predators. ''Butterflies, beetles, caterpillars have developed patterns that look like big eyes,'' he said. ''We know that this is a deterrent.''

Some local residents are said to be skeptical and argue that the clever tigers cannot be fooled for long. The director of the reserve has said he is worried because some men let the mask slip to the top of their head while chopping wood.

Among this year's victims, he wrote to the commission, were two fishermen who left their masks in their boats as they went ashore to cook their meal. One woodcutter was attacked from behind by a tiger when he sat down and took off his mask for lunch.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 4 of the National edition with the headline: Face Masks Fool the Bengal Tigers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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