Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Call of the wild

Wildlife conservationist and filmmaker Romulus Whitaker talks on working in India and what plagues wildlife protection here

PHOTO: K. MURALI KUMAR

IT'S NATURAL Romulus Whitaker: `India doesn't appreciate a trained biologist like me'

He doesn't believe in giving lectures; he rather prefers to get down to work. That is because Romulus Whitaker is not an armchair wildlife conservationist. The founder-director of Snake Park, Guindy, Chennai, is a treasure trove of information on India's wildlife.

New York-born, India-bred Whitaker, after getting a degree in wildlife management from Wyoming University, has travelled across the world and worked in places like Indonesia, Mozambique and Papua New Guinea. "India doesn't appreciate a trained biologist like me. The conservationists cannot even talk to the forest department officials," he says.

He agrees that he gets a raw deal in India, his home for nearly 50 years now, and surely would have achieved a lot more had he made such efforts in some other country.

The problem here, says Whitaker, is that it is still in the preservation mode and hasn't made the shift to conserving wildlife. "Demarking an area for a species and letting them grow there is not the solution. Ultimately, who's the real custodian of wildlife? Not you and me, who sit in the luxury of our homes and have sufficient to eat, but the poor tribes and farmers who share the same habitat as those animals and are affected by it. If you don't involve these people in the process, the government will not only render them jobless, but also provoke them into illegal activities such as poaching and killing," explains the man who's currently associated with the Centre of Herpetology, popularly known as the Madras Crocodile Bank.

And he cites the example of the Snake Park, which he used to rehabilitate the Irula tribe. He got them involved into snake venom extraction, and gave them a livelihood option after the ban on snakeskin trading rendered them jobless.

"Sometimes, conserving can also amount to a certain amount of culling, which is better off done legally and scientifically, and in a way that helps people," says the winner of the prestigious Whitley award. "This methodology has worked in so many countries. Just making thick laws and adding more to it often will not do."

Whitaker is also a filmmaker whose latest documentary for NatureQuest is titled The King Cobra and I. Tackling the decline of ghariyals in the Chambal River is what keeps him busy now, but he will soon head to Ethiopiato work on crocodile farming.

MANGALA RAMAMOORTHY

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail