With drought-like conditions across India over the last three years, both man and beast have been in various degrees of distress. While human beings can leverage science, technology, diplomacy or commerce to alleviate their predicament, wild animals have no such option.
So when the Environment Ministerissued a fiat to “shoot at sight” the blue bull in Bihar, because their depredations in cropped fields were adding to farmers’ distress, did he not remember that his mandate is also to ensure the protection of our forests and the creatures that inhabit them? And when the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972 has “prohibited hunting” (it came into force in 1973), how does the Minister empower “professional hunters” to do his bidding? How has this breed of so-called “professionals” been allowed to exist for the past five decades when the law of the land does not envision hunting?
The blue bull is in fact categorised as an antelope, the largest of all antelopes on the planet. In the process of evolution, this exceptional antelope was confined to the Indian subcontinent. It was hunted to extinction in Pakistan by the end of the last century, according to wildlife expert T.J. Roberts. In the event, India’s blue bull emerges as a frontrunner for the ‘living world heritage’ status, as I have suggested in an earlier article. Axiomatically, it implies that the blue bull must be ensured the right to life in the wild.
The fact that the antelope has fared much better in India is not out of pride arising from this animal’s endemic status. Rather, the saving grace for this magnificent antelope has been its old vernacular name, ‘nilgai’, which linked it to ‘gau mata’, the mother-cow. As the cow is held sacred by many in India, no one would take its life wilfully. But now, the Chief Minister of Haryana wants its name changed to Rojh.
The minister defends the culling of the nilgai as a modern practice by all enlightened governments to keep the numbers of a wild species in consonance with the carrying capacity of its habitat. Even if we give the minister the benefit of the doubt for his misplaced policy decision, does he have an answer to what the optimum numbers of blue bulls in Bihar should be? Did it not occur to his advisers to ask how many bulls need to be culled and, more importantly, how many females should be culled per male to help curb the procreative cycle?
When Mao Zedong devised a similar strategy to boost agricultural production by exterminating all house sparrows first, followed by the tiger, the free world rightly termed it an act of a megalomaniac. Nevertheless, the house sparrow ceased to exist in China as also the tiger (except in state-sponsored breeding farms) but their extermination did not add an ounce to China’s bread basket.
Over time, the blue bull has become a grazer of farming land, but if it is given the soft, fresh leaves of the baer tree, the sheesham, the kikar and the khair to browse on, it will gladly give up grazing altogether. Unfortunately, these native trees have lost out to the quick-growing soo-babul, the poplar and the eucalyptus, none of which can sustain the nilgai.
If we cannot sustain the forest habitats of wild animals, perhaps what we need is a welfare state that will come up with comprehensive crop insurance that addresses the damage to farmers.
After all, if a non-governmental organisation like the World Wide Fund for Nature in India can create a corpus fund to compensate in cash the predation on domestic animals by the tiger, surely the state can follow suit.
Lt. Gen. (retd.) Baljit Singh is passionate about nature and wildlife conservation and has served two terms as trustee of WWF-India.
