Sunday, January 4, 2015

Solving the #bigcat problem: An expert view on the man-cat conflict in India

If you take the statistics of the last five years, there has been a series of tragic events in the lives of leopards and tigers. Scores of them have lost their lives, been injured, been relocated from their forest homes or ended up in zoos. The recent episode in Kolhapur only goes to show that a new approach has to be developed to resolve man-cat conflict. 
To start off with, the forest service cannot play God to nature. Fiddling, manipulating, re-locating and capturing big cats are becoming a new fashion with the forest service. This culture needs to be nipped in the bud, as it has dangerous consequences for India’s natural world. 
Whenever a small problem occurs, leopards and tigers get quickly tranquilised and in some cases moved across the state and parachuted to new areas. In other cases, if they have a limp or a cut they get tranquilised and treated with antibiotic! Man’s interference in the life of the big cat has reached an extreme. Wild tigers and leopards are not pet dogs. 

Fiddling, re-locating and capturing big cats are becoming a new fashion with the forest service
Nature for most part must be left to its own devices. Even when tigers and leopards are relocated to vacant forests, as in Sariska’s case, the process has been severely flawed since the wisdom on which animals are relocated is abysmal. 
All across India, especially in Maharashtra, there is a non-stop procession of big cats moving back and forth at the whim of less than knowledgeable forest officers who most of the time have not even been trained in wildlife. Sometime this process is influenced by ‘the fly-by-night NGOs’.
Recently, in Karnataka a young tiger that had attacked and killed a person was moved from one place to another, and ended up killing a pregnant woman in his new home. It was shot dead. The question is why was it  moved at all? How many leopards in Maharsahtra have been relocated without any scientific basis? 
A leopard attacks a forest guard in Prakash Nagar on the outskirts of Siliguri, West Bengal, while trying to capture the animal which strayed into the village
Does the forest department have a system where the behaviour of the animal is analysed and a wildlife scientist consulted before a big cat is moved? 
How many of these decisions are based on the ridiculous instructions of senior government officers? 

Who are we going to hold responsible and accountable for flawed decision-making, where not just an animal life is lost but so is a human? 
The first thing that must be done is that the chief minister of the state where such problems occur must order an end to ‘big cat fiddling’. After 40 years of working with the big cat, I suggest the following immediate measures to resolve these conflicts: 
A forest official grapples with a leopard found hiding in Oil India campus, Assam
THE SOLUTION 
In many identified and known areas where conflict is high between the big cat and humans, we need to allow lateral entry on short-term contracts of wildlife scientists who join the team of forest officers and play a critical role in deciding how to deal with the problem animal. 
Lateral entry has been recommended by the Administrative Reforms Commission in 2009 and is being suggested so as to give the status of a government officer to the scientist in order that he is enabled to take decisions. All district forest officers must get a carefully drafted set of dos and don’ts regarding how to deal with problems of big cat and human encounters. 
It should spell out the steps of what you do when confronting these animals. Mishaps take place because of ad hoc decision- making. In identified areas critical forest staff who deal with such conflict situations need to be retrained in big cat biology and tranquilisation. 
Forest officials carrying a caged leopard in Dehradun, Uttarakhand
These training capsules should be provided by non-governmental specialists. If you do not know how to catch a leopard, do not catch it! Wait for someone who has the knowledge to arrive. If you catch it, do not take ad hoc decisions to re-locate it as relocating a problem animal can create a much worse problem for the people living in and around its new home. 
Any forest officer, government servant or NGO who participates in ad hoc decisions that cause injury or death to leopards, tigers or humans must be held accountable. Government officers need to have comments in their Annual Confidential report (ACR) that will effect promotion and lead to demotion. For the NGO, farewell! 
There will be positive recognition for procedures that are handled well. The crisis of dealing with big cat problems will only find solutions through encouraging talent that exists outside government to partner with government in taking correct decisions. 
The Indian Forest Service needs a wakeup call from the non-governmental expert and the time has come for them to encourage partnerships and strategic lateral entries. No longer can we tolerate slipshod attempts at dealing with leopards and tigers or excuses that are endlessly given regarding a lack of training and equipment. This is the 21st century and not the middle ages! The writer is author of ‘Tiger Fire’ & member of International Cat Specialist Group of the IUCN 
A screenshot of a leopard preying on the goat
Farmhouses lure leopards for fun in Gurgaon
Adventure seeking farmhouse owners in Gurgaon are using live baits to lure wild animals for fun even as a growing number of farmhouses in the region continue to threaten wildlife habitats. 
A two-minute video footage taken at a farmhouse in Aravali Retreat near Gurgaon and accessed by Mail Today shows a leopard preying on a tethered goat. But the footage, possibly taken late in the night, doesn’t show if the leopard itself has come under attack after feasting on its prey.
Though the hilly areas of Aravali forest comes under Gair Mumkin Pahad (noncultivable land), farmhouse owners allegedly take advantage of a legal lacunae to construct private properties in the region. According to a senior official who did not want to be named, farmhouse owners apply for Change of Land Use (CLU) on the grounds that their properties have already been cultivable land. 
And once the construction on a farmhouse begins, they secure the compound with electric fences. The method has proved fatal for wild animals which try to stray into the compound. The villagers believe that the number of dead leopards could be much higher in the Aravali region than what the officials records show. 
According wildlife officials, a leopard was found dead inside a golf resort last year and people were jostling to take photos with it. The officials also unearthed skeletal remains of three more big cats during investigation in and around the golf course premises six months later. Yet they don’t have a clear idea on the number of leopards residing in the region.

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