India, June 2 -- Madhava Gowda no longer greets the day by its first light. He now senses its arrival through sound. His life changed irreversibly on the morning of October 16, 2025, when he entered his field on the forested edge of Saragur taluk in Karnataka's Mysuru district.

In his village, Badagalapura, fields give way to scrub, and scrub to bamboo thickets and dense woodland. The boundary between cultivation and wilderness is narrow and often indistinct. Gowda and other villagers have long farmed this landscape and learned to navigate its hazards. But on that day, residents say, Gowda was working in his field when a tiger lunged at his face. By the time neighbours arrived, drawn by his screams, he had suffered catastrophic injuries....