Animal deaths: A trail of shame

Man-made disaster: Haphazard and lopsided development is leading to decimation of our wild flora and fauna

When Sansar Chand and his mates cleaned Sariska and Panna Tiger Reserves of the big cat, it made front page headlines in newspapers across the country. But regular straying of leopards into Borivli in well-populated north Mumbai or elephants electrocuted in Odisha hardly make it to the newspapers, leave alone being on the front page.
In-between the two news selection lies the untold story of animal deaths across the country - from north to south, east to west.

Poaching was, and continues to be the single most important threat to wildlife in 540 plus reserve forests in the country. Significantly, 69 per cent of these reserves also support resident human populations, mostly poor and disadvantaged, whose overall number was estimated to exceed 30 lakh in 1995. As a result, managing India’s wildlife in forest areas is always a challenge.

This apart, hundreds of elephants, leopards, wolves, jackals, hyenas, gaurs and other large animals are either killed by people living in fringe areas outside protected forests or slaughtered on the roads and rail tracks passing through jungles. As the geographical domain of wild animals is  shrunk in the name of development, their death toll is inevitably on the rise.

“Poaching is just one of the factors that is goading the extermination of wildlife. The canvas of unnatural deaths of animals is vast. Deaths of wolves, jackals, small cats, snakes or even butterflies and moths rarely make news when they are killed by vehicles speeding on roads running through forests and hills and dales,” says Atul Sathe, communications manager of the 127-year-old Bombay Natural History Society.

Animals instinctively stray into human habitation in search of food or an alternative hideout. They traverse the same corridors as humans to go from one place to another. In the course of such travels, they ravage crops and kill livestock, inviting human wrath and retaliation.

Close to 400 elephants were electrocuted or poisoned to death every year, while nearly 2,200 leopards were killed by poachers or mob fury in the last 10 years. In the absence of any systematic scientific studies, it is difficult to ascertain how other species are faring but it is generally believed that the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972 has a beneficial effect on conservation of animals in the wild.

It is, therefore, unfair to blame local communities living near forested areas for taking recourse to extreme action against their visitors from the wild. For, sharing space with elephants and leopards is a completely different experience than watching them in the wild from a protected vehicle with a gun toting forester, or on television in the safe comfort of one’s drawing room.

“Getting compensation for crops or livestock loss – which in any case is lower than their market value -- takes months on end and innumerable  visits to the forest department office, amounting to harassment. This adds to people's animosity towards animals,” says Sanjay Gubbi, a researcher at Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS), Bangalore.

Development projects add to animals’ woes. With more roads, railway lines, mines and power plants in the pipeline, large tracts of forest land are diverted for non-forest use, which essentially means shrinking space for wildlife. The government reactions are knee-jerk and policy measures are half-baked.

Take the case of killing of seven elephants by a speeding train in 2010, while they were crossing the railway tracks near Binnaguri in Jalpaiguri district in the northern part of West Bengal. The government clamped down by prescribing a speed limit of 45 kmph for all the trains – day and night – on that stretch. Watch towers were also planned to alert the railway staff and others on elephant movements. But two years hence, the ground reality continues to be the same.

Asked if the speed limit was being adhered to, a senior railway official confided to Deccan Herald: “Unless there is enough security, it is impossible for train drivers to maintain the speed limit as the area is highly vulnerable to security-related problems. Naturally, drivers try to cross the stretch as quickly as possible.”

Electrical fencing, Gubbi suggests, is one way to reduce man-animal conflict due to straying, and has been successfully implemented in Bandipur and Nagarhole periphery over the last two years. Electricity passing through these fences comes from a solar panel that delivers only a split second shock to animals coming in contact, just to scare them away. But in forest areas elsewhere, electrocutions have occurred because the fences were powered by high-voltage lines.

In Odisha, high tension electricity lines have turned into virtual death traps for wild elephants. A government report shows that between October 2009 and 2012, 64 wild pachyderms were found dead, out of which 28 were killed by low lying high tension power transmission lines running through the forest.

Sadly, after every such death, a blame game starts between the forest department and power distribution companies responsible for maintenance of the high voltage lines. But never a concrete step has followed to arrest the problem.

In Uttar Pradesh, three elephants were burnt alive when an 11,000 volt high tension wire fell on them after they uprooted an electric pole in Bodihya Kala village near Dudhwa sanctuary in Lakhimpur-Kheri district in May 2011. State forest officials, however, suspect locals for the deaths as they had been demanding compensation after a herd of elephants destroyed their crops and houses.

Man-made casualties

Leopards too bear the brunt. A survey by non governmental organisation Traffic India, suggests that over the last ten years, every week at least four leopards were killed either by poachers or by people who considered them a threat to their livelihood.

Collating and analysing publicly available data, the report claimed an estimated 2,294 leopards were killed between 2001 and 2010. The estimate has an error margin of 403, which means the figure could vary between 2,700 and 1,800.

“Conflict arises due to lack of land use planning. Protected areas are getting more isolated and fragmented. There is no cogent effort to make even a road map to prepare a land use policy," says Ravi Chellam, director, research and conservation, Madras Crocodile Bank.

Leopards frequent townships on the periphery of Mumbai regularly. Rarely does a week go by without a news snippet on straying of a forest animal into the city or an animal being run over by a vehicle or the death of a resident taking a stroll in the fast-encroaching forests surrounding the north-west and north-east suburbs. The spotted cats losing their traditional habitat in rocky outcrops, which are now converted into stone quarries in parts of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan, are also compelled to look for new sites.

“Proper planning is required as the natural habitats of the wild animals have shrunk. Their prey has also shrunk and, hence, they are coming into the residential areas,” says Renu Singh, director of Lucknow Zoological Garden.

There has to be a greater acceptance that large carnivores are outside protected areas. “Once we accept they are part of our landscape then more effective mitigation measures can be put in place,” says Vidya Athreya, a biologist at CWS, who studies the leopard.
Practical assistance to make livestock sheds predator-proof, and clearing up garbage to reduce the density of free-ranging pigs and dogs and thereby removing a major attraction for leopards also help. “But you need to take a long-term view on land use if animals are to be protected. Band-aid solutions won't work,” notes Chellam.

(With inputs from Saibal Gupta in Kolkata, Sanjay Pandey in Lucknow, S T Beuria in Bhubaneswar and Prabhat Sharan in Mumbai.)