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Stealthy ComebackBy Janaki Lenin |
KRISHNA was playing in the open courtyard of his house, while his grandmother was nearby washing vessels under a lone light that cast an eerie shadow on the wall. The tall stalks of corn that surrounded the house swayed and rustled in the breeze. Suddenly the electricity supply went off and the place went dark. As the boy's eyes grew accustomed to the moonlight, he saw a dark shape move behind the corn. Fear gripped his heart and he ran toward his grandmother just as a leopard pounced on him. While the bewildered old lady held on to the child, the leopard's teeth sank into the boy's leg. On hearing their cries the boy's mother rushed out of the house and startled the leopard. The big cat let go and disappeared into the fields as quietly as it had come. Krishna very nearly became another statistic - last year, 18 people were killed by leopards in this region. Until recently most of us, city-dwellers, believed that such stories could only be exist in books by naturalists Jim Corbett or Kenneth Anderson. Yet in recent months, incidents such as this have been increasingly reported in the media. Have leopards made a quiet come-back since the days when they were hunted as vermin? Are they re-colonising the country? Is it a case of conservation success? A many habitat animal Found throughout India, the leopard is the most adaptable of all the big cats. It lives in the valleys of wet tropical rainforests, up in cool temperate mountains and down in dry tree plantations of the plains, within protected forests and outside of them. It can slink through any overgrown area without people being the wiser. The leopard eats almost anything it can catch - from insects, rats and frogs to the deer and the pig - and will also scavenge. One leopard lived off medical waste dumped in the backyard of a hospital in Valparai, Tamil Nadu, before being trapped. This ability to survive on anything that's available means that the leopard does not need vast forests to maintain itself as does the tiger or the lion. The Wildlife Institute of India estimates that there are 14,000 leopards in India, of which about 7,000 live outside protected forests. The apex predator, the tiger, has been exterminated throughout most of its range, leaving the field open for the stealthy leopard. After every human fatality, the Forest Department is compelled to do something. The officials went by the book - the Indian Wildlife Protection Act states that the first option in dealing with dangerous animals is capture and translocation. If that is not possible, the act allows the animals to be kept in captivity and as a last resort, killed. Translocation as a solution The modus operandi was to trap leopards near human settlements and release them deep inside a forest, away from people. For years this is how carnivore-man conflict situations were dealt with throughout India. But the problem hasn't gone away. We hear of more and more leopard problems cropping up all over the country. Contrary to expectations, moving leopards around has only aggravated the problem. Within the last three years, in Maharashtra State alone, 150 leopards were released into protected areas after being trapped near human settlements. We'd like to believe that translocation gives individual animals another chance, but the reality is quite different. What we are doing is putting them out of sight, deep in the forest in the belief that wild animals are resilient and will survive all odds. In India, despite years of translocation, there has been no attempt to follow the released animals to study whether they survive or not. Wildlife biologists, Vidya Athreya, Sanjay Thakur, Sujoy Chaudhuri and veterinarian Aniruddha Belsare (funded by the Wildlife Protection Society of India) studied the leopard problem for a year. They interviewed local villagers, documented every casualty and came up with clear conclusions. As translocation is usually used to augment the population of endangered animals and, not as a way of dealing with problem animals, the team paid particular attention to this. Tracking the leopard About 100 kilometres east of Mumbai is the Junnar Forest Division, a vast patchwork of fields interrupted by tree plantations. Natural leopard prey was virtually non-existent here. But domestic animals were readily available - dogs, goats and calves. Leopards were known to prey on livestock here and human mortality was minimal. The local people did not consider it a big problem, but in 2000, the situation turned serious. Deliberate attacks on humans became alarmingly common. Narayangaon, a little settlement in northern Junnar, was the nerve centre of the conflict between man and cat. The team chose this area to do their study. The impact of translocation Vidya and her team tagged 40 trapped leopards with transponder microchips before they were translocated and released. Three of them were trapped again after people were attacked in the new sites. Some of these fresh zones of conflict had no history of man-eaters in living memory. In such situations, when people are suddenly forced to deal with marauding leopards in their neighbourhood, they will often take the law into their own hands and decide the fate of the cats by exterminating them. Already there are reports of many leopards being killed by villagers in retaliation for the losses they have suffered. Typically, when wildlife is perceived as a danger and a liability, it compromises the very basis of conservation. The second problem is that leopards are territorial and when re-located some will try very hard to get back home. In one astounding example of determination and homing instinct, a leopard translocated from its range in South Africa walked 540 km home, the distance between Chennai and Hyderabad. But India lacks such vast wild spaces. Any desperate leopard attempting to return home will only walk into more trouble with more people. Could this be the reason leopards show up in unexpected places like Chennai and Kozhikode? The other problem to consider is the impact of translocation on resident leopards. Ravi Chellam, a cat expert, says there is no existing suitable habitat (forests brimming with prey, and remote from human habitation) to move problem leopards to. Since all optimum forests already have resident leopards, translocation means re-locating cats into areas staked out by others. In the ensuing conflict for territory, the intruder or the resident is likely to get killed or driven out. If either of them is a mother leopard with cubs, the little ones will be the first victims of such confrontations. When many leopards are released in one area, as it usually happens, the resident territory holder may have to fight each of these intruders in turn, weakening its ability to hang on to its domain. The resultant upheaval in the leopard population will only escalate the problem for local people. The graphs that accompany the team's study are very revealing - the spike indicating leopard releases matches a similar spike in the attacks on livestock and man for the same period of time. In Junnar, in 2000-2001, the problem was contained within an area of 1,400 square kilometres with a casualty rate of 189 head of livestock and two persons. Post-2001, when translocations became the norm, the trouble zone nearly doubled to 2,400 sq. km. What needs to be done Mortality rocketed to 348 domestic animals (not including dogs) and more disastrously, 29 humans. The attacks abated only after 62 leopards were trapped and moved out (outsourcing the problem), with the result that now Junnar is nearly a leopard-free zone. Is the only solution to the leopard problem removing every single one of them? While India's 35,000 annual rabies deaths haven't led to a moratorium on stray dogs, leopards are made to pay a heavy price for every misdemeanour from mauling man and lifting livestock to wandering into fields and merely being seen. If we are really serious about this comeback of our wildlife, people also need to make adjustments to their lives and lifestyles. They need to understand that unless a leopard takes to man-eating or livestock-lifting regularly, it should be left alone. We could make settlements safer by changing cropping patterns but it's impractical to ask farmers to uproot their sugarcane and tea bushes. Almost all these areas also offer food - livestock, goats, and dogs. People living in leopard country will need financial help to reinforce flimsy mud or bamboo houses against a marauding leopard. Livestock should be securely penned, separately from people, at night. It's a loss to a villager if a leopard kills a goat but driving it away from its meal only makes it worse. The hungry animal will just go out and kill another goat or calf. Livestock can be insured against leopard depredations, so losses can be compensated. Villagers need to be taught how to avoid leopards and what to do in case of a confrontation. A very successful education campaign helped local people in Australia understand how to live with man-eating salt-water crocodiles when their population bounced back. A similar education campaign, "Living With Leopards" has to be initiated to address this issue. Big city, big cat POCKETS of leopard-human conflict have always simmered in India - the most notorious places being the States of Uttaranchal, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal. The latest and the most sensational attacks have been reported from Mumbai. The city is home to 13 million people, and some of its suburbs border the 103-square kilometre Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP). Late last year, a four-year old child playing in the parking lot of an apartment complex was killed and the leopard was seen trying to drag the body over the 18-foot high compound wall into the forest. Man killing has been going on for a long time in the SGNP but it became newsworthy only after the attacks on children outside the park. It quickly became a frenzied media event when a lawyer, jogging inside the park, was taken. His fellow lawyers banded together and filed a Public Interest suit in the Bombay High Court demanding that all leopards be removed from the SGNP. The park is beset by many problems. Migrant labourers who come to Mumbai in search of work have found cheap accommodation by encroaching on the National Park. The Forest Department is powerless to evict them since local politicians, smelling a profitable vote bank, have rallied to the squatters' cause. Stray dogs as prey Since 1950 when the forest was declared a National Park, 7.73 sq. km has been lost to encroachments. While the people brought chickens, cattle and goats into the forest, the number of natural prey like deer and wild boar came down. The dogs introduced into the park are an additional burden, working in packs to bring down deer. As a result the leopards of the park have plenty of domestic creatures to kill but too few wild prey. It's common knowledge among people living in leopard habitat that these cats love dogs and indeed, evidence from their scats show they are the primary diet of the Mumbai predators. If dogs are suspected of contributing to the increased leopard numbers, why isn't something done about them? Countrywide, the tussle between animal welfare organisations and the city municipal corporations has given India's estimated 25 million stray dogs a new lease of life. Perhaps nowhere is the problem more acute than in the city of Mumbai, a cornucopia of canine leopard-prey. Bittu Sahgal, the editor of the wildlife magazine Sanctuary Asia, estimates that the leopards of the SGNP kill 3,000 dogs a year. In such degraded forests, stray dogs attract leopards to human settlements, setting the stage for conflict. The leopard problem is not just a wildlife issue. Any solution would first require the City Corporation to clean up the mountains of garbage and eliminate stray dogs humanely. The Forest Department has to be given the muscle to evict encroachers and control stray dog numbers within the park. Restraint has to be exercised in granting building licenses in areas too close to the National Park and disturbance to the park should be minimised - don't even consider digging up the park to put in a petroleum pipeline. Humans must also recognise that leopards are wild and that the SGNP is their territory; it's not a recreational park. There are plenty of other tame places for these pursuits. Janaki Lenin
Draco Films/Draco Books |
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