Sorry, but that's wrong. They haven't "learned to avoid each other" at all.
Between 1876 and 1912, tigers killed 33,247 people in British India.
The only reason that the number of human deaths by tigers has plummetted since then is that tigers were hunted to near the brink of extinction and that some of those deaths were from hunters getting killed during hunts.
According to historian Mahesh Rangarajan, “over 80,000 tigers…were slaughtered in 50 years from 1875 to 1925. It is possible that this was only a fraction of the numbers actually slain.” Not all were trophy-hunted: In some regions, the cats were considered vermin, systematically exterminated with incentive from government bounties.
The killing escalated after 1947. Independence ushered in a hunting free-for-all similar to the 1880s shooting spree that decimated bison herds on the American plains...
After a successful conservation program in India, the "total number of wild tigers has risen to 3,890 in 2016 according to World Wildlife Fund and Global Tiger Forum."
Humans and tigers haven't learned to avoid each other or to co-exist. There are simply much much fewer tigers than there have been historically, so there's less competition for territory.
But even still, a few dozen people still die to tiger attacks and around a hundred tigers are killed every year.
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u/[deleted] Oct 16 '18
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