Of monsoon tourists and other damaging animals

Debating natural human predation in a poacher-hit Melghat

DNA, 10 July, 2013

We are driving out of the magnificent misty landscape of Melghat and I am intrigued by the outcome of a debate. Every monsoon, our small group of friends flocks to the forests. It is an old boys’ annual reunion of sorts. Last July, we spent a few days in the deodar heights — draped in luxuriant moss and blooming with a million ferns overlooking the Corbett tiger reserve — just half an hour’s drive from the madness of a tourist-beaten Nainital. The year before that, the destination was the oozy Konkan hills lapped by a rainy sea.

For someone like me who is in and out of forests round the year on work, this annual routine is doubly rewarding. For a change, I get to enjoy the forest without having to chase and kill deadlines. And because we schedule these trips during the monsoon, the dripping green of soaked canopies and fortified undergrowth presents a raw, overpoweringly tactile jungle experience that I, like many, adore the most. It is the wildest most forests get — with leeches, barely-there roads, tumbling trees and all.

One does not expect to see much wildlife this season. Though we escaped spells of windscreen-drumming rain common in this land of ‘confluence’ of the hills (hence, mel-ghat) and could move around quite a bit, the glistening bounty of washed green strangling the forest tracks hid most of its prized treasures. We logged quite a few birds, a small herd of bisons at Kolkas, but no, no big cats. Invariably, that prompted the dreaded question: are there really that many tigers in this reserve?

On paper, Melghat claimed 35 tigers as per the 2010 census. Last month, officials cracked a poaching racket. In custody, a few poachers apparently sang that they had killed five tigers inside Melghat over a month. The rich harvest indicates that this reserve used to harbour a healthy tiger population. The true extent of the loss to poaching, however, can only be ascertained when regular monitoring becomes possible again after the rains.

My friends quizzed a few staff and that changed the discussion. One of them recounted how low visibility due to fog made him almost run into a bison on his motorbike the other day. While both he and the bison reacted swiftly to avoid an unpleasant situation, a young techie and his family in the US, a couple of my friends recalled, were not as lucky. There was no issue of visibility. A wild deer, the size of a mule, just darted on to the road, giving little time or room to the driver plying at over 100 kmph. The family suffered severe injuries, not to mention a mangled vehicle.

In many areas in North America, there are just too many wild animals wandering into fast moving traffic, beavers clogging municipal networks with their dams and flooding driveways, bears turning up in backyards and raccoons pillaging the garbage, not to mention wild horses with nowhere to go.  Protective laws have in fact over-achieved and the result is too many wild animals amid people.

My friends wondered if it was the familiar story of missing forests forcing out inhabitants. In fact, it is not. In many parts of the developed world, a shift from agriculture and automation replacing plough animals has eased pressure on land. The result is re-wilding of vast areas. But wild animals are quite like us. If they get tastier food with higher calorie-value, and get it easily, they have no reason to stick to their ‘natural diet’ inside forests.

The situation is the same at home. Unlike standing crop that offers a walk-in buffet, forest fodder has to be foraged and the search is often tedious because the animal will have to eat wild plants many times, say, a moderate feeding of rice, to get the same nutrition.

So, is it a problem of missing predators? It is easy to conclude that we have so many wild boars and deer because the tigers and leopards are missing. It is no doubt true for many forests. Sariska was a classic example where the sambar population multiplied rapidly after the local extinction of the tiger. Introducing a few tigers has partially reversed the situation.

But what do we do in densely populated areas afflicted by crop-raiding, car-dashing animals? For example, can we really let loose a few tigers in the fringe forests around Jalpaiguri town where too many bisons shuttling across roads are posing constant and grave danger to traffic?

Or, I finally risked provoking my companions, should we accept and allow that humans, too, are natural predators? We have always been. Our anti-predatory laws make sense in and around high-priority forests that serve as breeding grounds for the wild. In and around such areas, agricultural land use and crop selection must adjust to the demands of conservation. Elsewhere, the wild has the right of passage for free dispersal from one breeding ground to another. But, even in these areas, human lives and livelihood deserve reasonable protection.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. It is never difficult to shoot a leopard (if it hasn’t been lynched by the people) or an elephant just to allay panic in the urban centres of Guwahati or Mysore. But that doesn’t apply to thousands of villagers under real livelihood threats and at the mercy of ungulates. A few states that hesitantly issued hunting permits in the recent past have drawn flak from animal welfare groups. Ironically, perceived threat to human life is a lawful reason to kill, but not destruction of livelihood.

Though it wasn’t the wisest of diversions from a discussion on poaching, most in our group saw the point. But a born-again vegetarian chose stubborn silence the rest of the way.