Dangerous mind games

Animal sensitivities cannot be ignored

New Indian Express (Pg 11), Jan 28, 2009

SO many times have I come across the expression “animal passion” in both respectable and not-so-respectable literature that, at some point, it seemed the only emotional virtue humans could relate to, and admire, in animals is their intensity while pairing. Yes, we know animals have sharper senses. We even seek inspiration from animal intelligence (think dolphins) or technology (bats). But when it comes to animal emotions, we set the limit at the faithfulness of our pet dogs.

I am not given to anthropomorphic tendencies, but this assumption that animals are emotionless has landed us in a situation of nationwide escalation in human-animal conflict. Tigers are killing people in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Sunderbans. Elephants are a menace across the country from Assam to Karnataka. Leopard encounters are making headlines in almost every state.

What have we done to address such conflicts? Officially, we capture, translocate and, at times, kill. Unofficially, we poach by poisoning, electrocution or plain beating. We surely take all these legal and illegal steps with the single motive of feeling safer. But do our actions achieve that purpose?

Take the elephant, for example. Theirs is a matriarchal society where the females jointly share the responsibility of raising the calves. At a certain age, the young bulls leave and join a big boy group but the females stay in their family. The young bulls, when they are big enough and adequately groomed by the dominant males of the boy group, return to the female herds to mate.

In a conflict situation, the government response is to identify those dominant male elephants that lead the raids on croplands and capture them. While rare rogue, habitual killers must always be removed, the government machinery, under public pressure, often goes for random capture of bulls.

Many nod to this approach. First, they argue, taking a few bulls away does not affect the matriarchal families. Secondly, elephants are polygynous and even fewer bulls will successfully mate with available females.

Removal of dominant bulls is in any case a short-term solution since subpopulations soon find replacement. But conflict usually worsens because in the absence of dominant bulls in a boy group, the young elephants feel directionless and turn aggressive. Since these same young bulls replace the missing big brothers in the frontline, they aggravate conflict when in charge of raids. Besides, not only do these immature bulls get to mate before their time but also the gene pool becomes smaller with fewer bulls available for breeding.

If administrative strategies are so myopic, the community response is worse. Consider the recent case of Karnataka in which more than two dozen elephants were electrocuted in Nagarhole, Bandipur and Bannerghatta during the second half of 2008. The casualties include not only bulls but also a number of females. Loss of the matriarch can permanently upset an elephant society. A group of delicate, inexperienced mothers, already saddled with a bunch of young orphans, is left leaderless. Now throw in a few aggressive, immature bulls and you have a recipe for chaos.

Experts like G A Bradshaw have argued how elephants as a species are suffering from chronic stress as victims of sustained conflict. Sounds improbable? The first MRI scan of an elephant brain conducted three years ago found a large hippocampus that stores mem ory, and a prominent structure in the limbic system that processes emotions.

If we continue to intervene mindlessly, we will only have more and more psyched out elephants cutting loose. An unnatural spurt in infighting apart, incidents of stress-induced abnormal behaviour such as young, “deranged” bulls “raping” and killing rhinos in dozens all over Africa have been well documented.

It is not just elephants that are being pushed around. Between 1999 and 2004, Maharashtra trapped 293 leopards and translocated 274. More than 200 people died in leopard attacks and at least 900 were injured. In seven years since 1995, tigers entered Sunderbans villages 25 times. After regular trapping and translocation, the frequency doubled as 20 cases were reported in the next three years. In Jammu and Kashmir, 14 human deaths over three years triggered a translocation drive that shifted 70 bears in the winter of 2006-2007. In the next year, 25 deaths were reported.

So what is wrong with translocation? First, it does not solve the problem. Removing an animal from its territory only allows the young to fill in. Sec ondly, it creates fresh conflict. Once captured, animals are kept in cages, traumatised and released in unfamiliar territory. If you have ever tried to get rid of domestic cats by dropping them far away from home, you will know they invariably come back. Now imagine displaced wild animals trying to home back, moving hundreds of kilometres through densely populated areas. There are records of a female leopard travelling 100 km (Yaval to Chalisgaon, 2003) and a male elephant walking 180 km (LahiriChoudhury, 1993) to return to their native territory. While the leopard killed six people and injured 12 on her way , the bull killed one and injured two.

The bottom line: animals have a mind and they can lose it too. But we drive them crazy at our own peril. Present ad hoc measures of shoving them around to get them out of our way only brings the dangers back in more unexpected, disastrous ways. If we are still not brazen enough to kill these animals en masse as a policy, we have to frame case-specific scientific strategies to give them their space and peace of mind.

Either way, it is time we come clean.

(The author is an independent journalist and filmmaker. mazoomdaar@gmail.com)