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Chinese authorities issued a warning after a viral video showed a farmer narrowly escaping a Siberian tiger attack on Monday in the country’s northernmost Heilongjiang province.
Two men were reportedly attacked, including a 65-year-old farmer who needed surgery on his hand, local reports said.
Reports suggested that there are currently two Siberian tigers on the loose in the Jixing Korean-Chinese village of Bori prefecture, Chitaihe in Heilongjiang Province, though officials have not confirmed their capture.
This marks the first sighting of a Siberian tiger in Boli county in China.
A viral video shared on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform on Tuesday, captures the moment the man steps into the street, spots the tiger, and quickly retreats to shut a large iron gate just as the massive cat lunges at it.
Reuters reported that his son informed a local radio station that two tigers were on the loose, though officials have neither confirmed the number nor reported any captures.
Authorities warned locals to report tigers if they spot any and also urged them to protect their livestock.
Siberian tigers are generally more active in the early morning and dusk hours, Reuters quoted a notice from the authorities as saying.
“Compared to other big cats, they can coexist with humans and are not very aggressive,” it said.
In October 2021, China established the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park spanning 14,100sqkm across the Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces in the country. The park was created to protect and restore the habitats of the Siberian tiger and Amur leopard.
The Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park spans across the southeastern region of Heilongjiang and the eastern region of Jilin province in China.
This is not the first instance of a tiger from Baekdusan mountain – on the border between North Korea and China – entering a residential area and attacking a person. In December last year, a man walking his dog in a village in eastern Khabarovsk, Russia, was fatally attacked by a tiger near Mount Baekdu.
The Siberian tiger, the largest tiger species in the world, is classified as endangered and listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List.
China has about 70 wild Siberian tigers.
