No room in the Ark

By Manohar Malgonkar

DID cinestar Salman Khan and his cronies really kill a chinkara and two black bucks while on location near Jodhpur last autumn is a matter for our law courts to decide. What is most heartening is the degree of public concern about the killings, the intensity of feeling. Does that mean that, at long last we have begun to care for whatever wild life still survives in India?

But then is it not already too late? and that the total extinction of our wild animals only a matter of time?

And not too much at that!

It is ironical but true. Independence for India was the deathknell for its wildlife. During the Raj, the sahibs enforced the laws of the land with commendable strictness. Hunting was permitted, but carefully monitored, too. It might even be argued that the only way of preserving an ecological balance between the number of wild animals and the space available for them was to permit hunting under supervision. In the princely states of course, there was no hunting at all, except for the ruler and his family and guests for whom the entire area of the state was a hunting preserve.

Until August 15, 1947, there was hardly an area of the subcontinent, desert, forest, scrub, marshland, hills, that did not boast of some special variety of wildlife. In the forest lived the elephants and bears and bisons and tigers and leopards and sambhars and cheetal, all of them prize trophies for the world’s hunting fraternity. The great plains had their own animal wealth: the antelopes. You could see them making patterns against the horizon from the windows of trains. The Terais, the trans-Himalayan tract common to Uttar Pradesh and Nepal, was said to be a veritable tiger-land. It has now been shaved clean of all shrubbery and transformed into a farmer’s dreamland.

Up until the mid 1940s, trains running through the arid wasteland of southern Maharashtra, between Miraj and Belgaum, had often to reduce speed to avoid running smack into a herd of stampeding buck — so numerous were they because this area was part of the hunting preserve of the Maharaja of Kolhapur.Well, not quite 20 years later, an American advertisement agency wanted to photograph a black buck for promoting a brand of whisky called the Canadian Club. The team which had been sent all the way from America had to photograph a stuffed animal kept in the Maharaja of Kolhapur’s palace.

So what happened to those teeming herds of black buck and chinkara in the Maharaja’s preserve? Democracy happened. The maharajas were bundled off and their hunting preserves became the people’s hunting preserve. The people exercised their rights and shot them all off.

Anyhow, around 1970, they enacted the Wildlife Protection law which made the killing of animals in the wild a crime. For one thing, this law was never rigorously enforced. Poaching went on unrestricted. Not many hunters were prosecuted — let alone convicted.

But it is not hunting alone that kills wild animals. The clearing away of forests does that just as effectively. Mining for iron and manganese ores and timber extraction went on as before and development activities — (construction of new roads, the laying down of electric and telephone lines,) also took a heavy toll on the wildlife.

Wildlife conservationists say that every elephant in the wild needs two square miles of forest to support it. There just isn’t that much forest left in India, or, for that matter, in much of the rest of the world. The problem of living room for animals has already passed the point of no return.

In the 1950s Alan Moorehead wrote his book No Room in the Ark, to highlight the plight of wild animals in Africa. The growth of population and the pressure of economic development had vastly reduced African wildlife.

The Indian situation is far worse. In the 50 years since independence, the population has increased four-fold — the same land mass now must support four Indias in terms of the number of people. Such living space as there is has to be shared with the wild animals. For them it is a no-win situation. It is no use pretending. It is only a matter of time before all of India’s living space is taken up for human needs. There will be no animals still left in a wild state.

The USA covers an area of land three times as large as ours, to support a population that is only one-fourth of our number. Twelve Indians must share the living space that is available to a single U.S. citizen. It is a frightening statistic. It is a fact of life.

So how much time, before our wild animals have vanished from our midst? Maybe 50 years, but only if the existing laws for the protection of our wildlife are strictly enforced, if our political leaders are sincere in their efforts to slow down the destruction of our forest lands, if the growth of population is somehow kept in check, if....

So many ifs. Past experience tells us that it is too much to hope for. Indeed I don’t think anyone would have made much fuss over the slaughter of a chinkara and a couple of black buck near Jodhpur if it had not been election time but, even more, because the animals killed — and greedily consumed — happened to be from an area whose inhabitants hold them to be sacred. It was they who gave the alarm and raised the stink.

Would those whose business it is to enforce the wildlife protection laws themselves have taken up the issue? — One can’t help wondering.

The situation is not special to India. In other parts of the world, too, there is this ceaseless struggle for living room. It is just that, in India, the quite alarming growth in population has given this struggle an extra sharpness as well as urgency, so that with us it is no longer a question of seeking to restore an imbalance by allocating inviolable reservations to our wildlife, but rather of finding out ways to delay its final extinction. We just don’t have the space to play about with.

Ok, it is stupid to predict the future. But the lessons of the past cannot be ignored either. What happened to those enormous herds of black buck in the Maharaja of Kolhapur’s hunting preserve will surely happen to all the wild creatures of the world, too: development, greed, global warming, tourism, and more than all these, the prolific growth of population will see to that.

Even the island of Galapagos, which served Charles Darwin as his laboratory for building up his theory of evolution, has not remained unaffected. Darwin was dumbfounded at the behaviour of the island’s birds which, with all their gifts of flight, would scarcely move when approached by man and "could be killed by a switch, or be even caught in a hat."

It can be a weird experience as I can say from experience... of wild creatures not behaving like wild creatures.

While in the Army, I was once sent to join a showing-the-flag cruise by our navy. In the Andamans, in the early 50s I joined a shooting-for-the-pot expedition taken out by some of the ship’s officers. As we approached the shore of an island is a row boats, we saw some spotted deer grazing in the distance. They actually came down to the edge of the water to take a look at us. Then when one of their number was shot and fell down thrashing, some of its mates came up to investigate and others stood staring at us in bewilderment, waiting to be shot.

In Galapagos, so I have read, birds nowadays behave like birds anywhere else. Its iguanas (which were once regularly hunted) are now a rare species and of its variable armies of turtles which used to lie around on the sand, very few are still left because, during the great days of whaling, American and British ships used to pick them up by the hundred, to be stored upside down in the hold of shops, "so that they could have fresh meat on their long voyages."

I don’t know if there are still any spotted deer left in the Andaman islands, or whether, like the black buck herds in the Maharaja of Kolhapur’s preserve, they have all been killed by their new masters.