The Growing Conflict

The biggest conservation issue in shrinking wilderness areas all around the world is that of human animal conflict. Growing human populations and dwindling wilderness areas has put the man and the beast in direct confrontation, and what makes it worse is that, it is a vicious cycle. As human settlements move closer to the forests, they start living on the resources on which the animal populations are directly or indirectly dependent. For most part, these people who live in the forest fringes are the poorest of the poor. They trickle into the forest for collecting fuelwood and minor forest produce like honey, fruits, berries etc. They let their cattle roam free inside the forest. The impact of cattle grazing inside forests cannot be stressed enough. Not only do the herds have a voracious appetite and they graze away everything in the lower story of the forest foliage, from leaves, to grass, to roots, to even seeds, leaving almost nothing for wild herbivore, their hooves make the ground very hard and unsuitable for sustaining or nurturing any kind of plant life. To add to this are the diseases and epidemics that spread from domestic cattle to wild herbivore populations. Dwindling natural prey populations and easy prey in the form of cattle makes starving predators kill domestic cattle for food, which is a big loss for a poor farmer with strained resources. Frequent occurrences of such incidents makes villagers hostile and they turn to the government for getting the animal shot, or capturing it using snares and then beating it to death, or by
poisoning its kill. They cannot identify the real culprit in most cases, so, any random leopard gets punished for a crime committed by another of it's species. In the Indian forests, it is the leopard which lives in closer proximity to the human populations. In south India, elephants are notorious for raiding crops. In
forest fringe villages of Africa, lions often kill cattle or turn man-eater. Hippos are the notorious crop raiders. Hungry crocs are turning man-eaters in river side African villages because villagers are rapidly decimating the croc's main source of food: fish. Black bears have become a menace in West Virginia like wolves in Italian villages and starving polar bears in the Arctic settlements. Human-Animal conflict is the same story everywhere.

Since the last few years, I have read stories of leopards encroaching peripheral villages around Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Borivily every year. Some have turned man-eaters; starving, they encroach into peripheral settlements and pick up a human victim from time to time. As my sympathies lie with the families of these victims, many of whom lose the only bread winner in the family, and what they get after the loss and ordeal is the cold callousness of government bureaucracy, I can't help but wonder - WHO is the real encroacher here? WHO has encroached on WHOM?

For more on human-animal conflict in Bombay, check out this article here.