"The tigers are hungry' The world's largest big cat sows fear in Siberia

The attacks seemed to come from nowhere.

- Patrick Greenfield

At first, the tigers snatched guard dogs on the edge of villages in Russia's far east, emerging from the forest at night. Others went for livestock, going after horses and cattle.

Then the attacks on people began. In January, an ice fisher was mauled at night and dragged away by a big cat, just weeks after a forester had been killed. In March, another man was attacked and partly eaten by a tiger. It was the deadliest winter for tiger attacks in Siberia for decades.

For years, the Amur tiger, also known as the Siberian tiger, was so rarely seen that it was considered a ghost of the forest. The world's largest big cat, celebrated for its power and resilience, is also one of the most endangered. A few hundred cling on in a remote fragment of the Siberian taiga and a sliver of the Russian-Chinese border, remnants of a territory that once spanned the Korean peninsula and north-east China.

But since 2020, Amur tigers have left the forest in unprecedented numbers, sparking fear among the communities that live alongside them. African swine fever has swept through the region. It has killed vast numbers of wild boar, a main food source for the tigers and particularly popular with females with cubs. The virus probably came over the border from China, where millions of pigs died after an outbreak that began in 2018.