The rustle in the canopy was whisper-like and yet I tensed instinctively. The leaves of the Dillenia tree were large enough to hide him and I scanned them closely. The noise had come from the top left but there was nothing there except a large elephant apple ready to fall and split on the ground. Look right, slightly more to the right, I thought and then I heard the sudden whoosh. There was no time for vigil any more and I jumped backwards. Just in time, too, for with an enormous thud, the leopard landed on the ground on all four feet.
His body tensed at the fall, the grey-green cloud markings rippling along the body. A tail swished in contempt; long, longer than body, longer than that of any other cat. “Easy, easy now, boy! I tried to sound firm, but he was not listening. A low snarl started in his throat, regret at having missed his mark, and then he whirled around and ripped his claws against my trouser legs. I had been careful to wear jeans, a protective jacket and a large hat. You did not go into his area inappropriately attired. I shook my leg to get him off and after his customary three or four swipes, he obliged, retreating into the low bush.
You had to be well on your guard every moment you were around the young clouded leopard that the Wildlife Trust of India and the International Fund for Animal Welfare were rehabilitating back into the wild. His claws could leave ugly scratches on you if he landed on your head but what I feared most were his teeth. Longer than that of a sabre-toothed tiger, a clouded leopard’s canines could puncture the jugular with ease. If you allow him to land on your neck, that is. “Come, Bhaskar, let us leave him alone,” my vet and I retreated leaving him with Ontai. A Bodo keeper of the leopards, Ontai left a life of poaching to rehabilitate animals with us for the last many years. He was the only person the animal was used to, other than tolerating the minor incursions that some of us made into his life. He was the fifth animal to be put back into the wild by us, hand-reared after being rescued from locals who had caught him when young from the wild. The rare feline was considered so mythical that when I first wrote my book on the mammals of India, there was no photograph of the cat from within the country. Two studies on it by reputed wildlife institutions had yielded not even one camera trap photo. And here were not one, not two, but five different creatures caught by the local Bodos that needed careful rehabilitation back into Manas National Park.
“No wild animal should be released back into the wild unless it has a positive effect on conservation.” The room I sat in, many years ago in Switzerland, was cold and grey. It was cold from the air-conditioning and cold from a conservation philosophy that placed little value on individual life. They were referring to the IUCN Reintroduction Guidelines. There was much chaos in the conservation world with diseased animals being released back into the wild, spreading unknown maladies. There were animals of unknown provenance, emanating from wildlife seizures, released into forests that they were not native to. And there were behaviourally compromised animals that led human-imprinted lives in the forest. All these were a conservation no-no.
Traditional conservation principles only worried about animal populations and ecosystems. If the sum total of a target population of animals was doing well on the statistical curve used to measure their demography, scientists would retire to their ivory towers convinced that all was well with the world. The principles of sustainable use, carrying capacity of the ecosystem, and ecosystem health all had that basic tenet inbuilt into them: damn the individual, let’s think big. I had learnt my conservation, however, in the land of Ashoka, Gandhi and Buddha. Their morals were intertwined into my scientific temper like a tropical liana. Why was this scientific tenet never broached on human population dynamics, I wondered? Why were anthropologists and sociologists not driven by the overall good of the population, of a race of beings, or of a nation state to the detriment of the individual? Men who had practised this philosophy, the Hitlers and Maos, were considered evil outliers. When it came to animals, why was the same rationale suddenly considered derogatorily as an emotional reaction?
Individual vs. ecosystem
So I interrupted the gathering. “I think we should change that sentence in the reintroduction guidelines,” I said. “Let’s reword it to read: ‘No wild animal should be released back into the wild unless it has a negative effect on conservation’. Surely that will take care of all the deleterious effects of unplanned and unwanted releases into the wild affecting the health and genetic integrity of our wild populations? But if an individual, healthy and free, leads its life unfettered by captivity, let it do so, irrespective of its good to the larger whole. Let us ensure that animal welfare is not anathema to wildlife conservation.”
Back in India, it was time to practise what one had preached. The Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC) came up in 2002 on the fringes of Kaziranga in Assam, where the river Brahmaputra plays an annual ecological game with terra firma, deluging and enveloping it in its watery fold every monsoon. Where scores of deer and rhino, elephant and monkey, birds and reptiles are swept away every year, or enter human habitats and are captured and kept as pets or eaten. Those that surviveend up in Guwahati Zoo, the very meaning of the word rescue losing its ethical construct.
With CWRC began the practice that animals that could go back, healthy and behaviourally uncompromised, would be put back where they came from or would repopulate a besieged World Heritage Site that had lost all its animals due to poaching and civil strife. Manas was reborn, full of deer and bears, elephants and rhinos and even now the occasional tiger and clouded leopard released through rehabilitation.
The political leadership of Bodoland reciprocated, their hearts swollen with native pride. They tripled the land that Manas had, promising more than had ever been added in independent India to a nature reserve. Nature rebounded with the resilience only Nature can show. Three rhinos orphaned as calves in Kaziranga now gave birth once and then twice, with inter-calving intervals that were so short they were species records. Rehabilitated elephants joined wild ones and led long and socially interactive lives. A tiger captured as a conflict animal and released into Manas sent radio signals even when he ventured into Bhutan and survived a couple of years there, dying only much later when caught in a poacher’s trap. The enigmatic clouded leopards brought life to the western tips of Manas and made the conservation of Greater Manas a possibility. The lives of these animals made a difference not only to their individual selves, but also to the conservation of other endangered species such as rhino and endangered ecosystems such as Manas.
Individual animal welfare and nature conservation were not, this experiment shows, fundamentally incompatible. It proves the animal scholar Marc Bekoff right. “Science and the ethical treatment of animals aren’t incompatible. We can do solid science with an open mind and a big heart”.
The writer is a conservationist and best-selling author of nature classics, with a passion for elephants.
