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COVER
STORY: ENVIRONMENT
Green
Berets
A few
single-minded crusaders fight for India's wildlife - or what's left of
it
by Vijay
Jung Thapa
As
the moonlight cuts silver streaks across the thorny desert, Yadavendradev
Jhala crouches next to a large cactus bush waiting for his "wolf
family" to arrive. The wildlife scientist has been tracking this
particular pack of wolves for days across the scrubby wilderness of the
dome-shaped landmass the locals call Kutch, which translates literally
to turtle. Suddenly, his companion-the local tracker-taps him on his shoulder.
Jhala jerks his head up to see the shining eyes of the alpha (dominant)
male in the enveloping darkness. A few metres ahead a smaller animal,
the alpha female, forages in the shadows.
But Jhala quickly senses something isn't right-the rest of the pack is
missing, so too are the litter of pups he knows the alpha couple have
had.
 |
| Vivek
Menon is furiously blowing the whistle on poaching |
Next morning,
under a glittering-blue sky, an investigation of the pack's den confirms
his fears. It has been burnt and stuffed with thorns. Hours later, they
track down the "killer" in the nearby settlement-an 18-year-old
shepherd who had lost two out of his six goats to the pack. The boy had
simply followed the drag marks of the goats, discovered the den and blocked
it with boulders. Later, he'd returned with more accomplices, smoked the
pups out and smashed their heads with a lathi.
"This
kind of killing is a common occurrence," says Jhala, who is known
for his iconoclastic studies on Indian wolves. Of late, he says, villagers
have started using poison (spraying it around the den); Jhala's studies
indicate that 70 per cent of all recorded wolf mortalities were due to
this. "If this trend continues, we will soon lose the entire carnivore
guild of Kutch." Wolves, even though they're known to be a hardy
race, are on the endangered list of Indian wildlife. Once they roamed
around large parts of the country, scouring the landscape in numerous
packs. Today, the northern tip of Kutch holds the biggest wolf population
in the country-and even that is threatened.
Unless one
man can do something about it. Jhala's plan to save the Indian wolf is
twofold. By his research, he plans to paint the wolf in a totally new
light that bridges the "unbridgeable" chasm between man and
animal; the wolf isn't the cunning, dangerous vermin that eats livestock
and carries away the occasional human baby but is a supersmart carnivore
that is capable, like us, of feeling happiness, pain and anger. The other
thrust of Jhala's struggle is to build a national management strategy
for wolves. His five-year study (it will continue for another three) has
painstakingly collected data on diet, pack behaviour, gene pool and habitat.
Jhala's plan for this proud animal is to use this data to identify a handful
of ideal wolf fortresses-and then efficiently manage them with a good
conservation plan backed with scientific data. Given the voracious human
appetite for land, even he knows achieving this would be nothing short
of a miracle. "But," he adds, "one has to keep trying."
The plight
of the wolves only symbolises the tragic fate of Indian wildlife today.
At the dawn of Independence, forests draped the country like an elegant
green gown-covering more than half the land-nourishing and protecting
wildlife. Today, this very gown is in tatters, slashed by human interests,
covering only 4 per cent of the country. Human beings are the only ones
who possess the power to snuff life out of all other species in the world.
It's a formidable power, one that can so easily turn malevolent-and how
we handle that capacity defines our nature. Unfortunately for us Indians,
we've been more than malevolent-we've been natural born killers. Where
we've failed is to understand that the earth is one intricate ecosystem
of links by which all life is shaped. Lose one species, and a thousand
others will be on the brink eventually threatening our survival.
SO this
isn't a story about wild-life. This is about us. More specifically, a
few among hundreds of others who have decided to fight it out to the end-so
long as there are animals in the wild. These are people like Jhala who
battle-day in and day out-in the little swathes of forest that hold our
wildlife. Unsung, unheralded, unnoticed, they lead their lives with courage
and conviction-fighting at every step a callous government, a corrupt
Forest Department and a continually growing human population. They are
our Heroes of Wildlife, though they hardly see themselves as such. To
them, success would come only if millions of other Indians joined in their
struggle.
Driven by
nothing but a deep concern that comes from within, they know that all
they can look forward to is a continuous struggle, with no rewards. But
talk to them and their visions grip you-the mind experiences a kind of
electricity, there's a thrill of beginning again, of seeing a new world
where man and animal learn to co-exist in peace. They know that the war
for most species has already been lost-it's just a matter of when (not
if) they will fall into that dark abyss of extinction. Still they fight.
This is their story.
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