Parents in a region of India near the border with Nepal are living in fear of wolves that kill and eat children after a series of wolf attacks in 30 nearby villages.
All told, nine children and one adult have been attacked and carried off from their homes in the Bahraich district. All were killed. The youngest was a boy just one-year-old, while the oldest was a woman of 45. In addition to the deaths, 34 people have been wounded by attacking wolves.
One family lost their four-year-old daughter Sandhya to such an attack. The little girl was sleeping outside her family’s hut on August 17 during a power outage that blanketed the village in darkness. Her mother, Sunita, said the wolves attacked just two minutes after the lights went dark, and her daughter was missing before they even realized that wolves had approached. The girl’s body was found in a sugarcane field about 500 yards from her home the next day.
Not long before this, a boy of eight named Utkarsh was also sleeping outside in a nearby village when his mother saw a wolf creeping up on the family. She said the animal “lunged from the shadows” but she was able to frighten it away along with her neighbors by screaming at the beast.
Residents of this group of villages are terrified. Many of their modest huts don’t even have locking doors. Parents are keeping their children inside and the men have been out on foot patrol along the streets at night. Government officials have also sent up drones and have installed cameras to track the wolves; they’re also setting up traps and using firecrackers to scare the animals away. They’ve been able to capture four wolves so far, which have been sent to zoos.
While wolf attacks on humans are usually rare, when they do happen, the wolves are usually rabid. One infected wolf is capable of attacking many people before it gets too sick to continue. Anyone bitten by an animal infected with rabies must endure multiple injections of a vaccine over several weeks, and that has to happen quickly after injury and before the disease takes hold.
Experts think the wolf attacks are sparked by seasonal flooding in Bahraich. Monsoon rains have been so heavy recently that the topography and landscape has been reshaped. The region is home to wolves, but they’re staking out new territory as their prey animals have been killed or driven away by the flooding and the altered vegetation landscape.
