Visiting Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan, North India, photographer MD Parashar was lucky enough to witness a fight between tigers and wild boars that are rarely seen in the wild.
The video, which lasts about 20 seconds, shows a tiger fighting a wild boar. The couple collided between the fallen leaves and the trunks of the forest.
MD Parashar shared that the images were taken around 8:50 am local time inside the Indian national park. The tiger in a life and death battle with the boar is called the Noor Tigress T-39.
The boar is big, but it doesn’t seem to cause much trouble for the tigress. After a long fight, the boar finally lost. The tiger bit hard into the Indian boar’s back as the animal struggled.
The tiger used its big paw to strike the boar in the face, it growled and screamed, it tried to run away but failed.
The Indian warthog is distinguished from its European counterpart by its large body size, larger skull, and smaller ears. An adult Indian warthog can weigh up to 136 kg.
Wild boar in India is a famous prey of tigers. Tigers also eat smaller animals like birds and rodents and even larger objects like deer and elephants.
Noor Tigress is on the list of endangered tigers on the Ranthambore National Park website. This tigress gave birth to several litters of tiger cubs between 2012 and 2016.
Tigers like Noor are listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Endangered Species. The agency estimates there are about 3,500 big cats left in the wild.
In particular, tiger populations have rebounded in India in recent decades after a government-led initiative called ‘Project Tigers’.
The project declared the tiger the national animal of India and intensified conservation efforts. The 2018 report on the status of tigers in India says there are some 2,967 species of animals in the country, more than four-fifths of the global total. This represents a significant increase from the 2010 estimate of 1,706 tigers.