Human–Animal Conflict In Urban Areas

The burgeoning urbanization has intensified the conflict between humans and animals in India's urban areas. Due to increasing population of stray animals, our cities are grappling with canine and simian menace. In this article, Dr Surya Prakash highlights the grave situation of the man–animal conflict in the urban areas and points out that we all must join hands on this serious issue and think beyond translocation, relocation, and sterilization of the stray animals as these measures have neither proved to be effective in controlling the population of these animals nor the menace.

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Human and animal conflicts are no longer restricted to wildlife sanctuaries in countries such as India. In a fast urbanizing world, man– animal or human–animal conflicts have reached our doorsteps, literally. In a shocking incident in Delhi a few years back, a monkey snatched away an infant from its house and partially ate the baby’s head in front of his mother before the mother could react. In another shocking incident in 2017 in Delhi, a group of stray pigs snatched away an infant from his mother and ate him before he could be saved. Recently, a national daily reported that there are six cases of monkey bites per day in Delhi. Incidents of stray dogs mauling children are also not very uncommon. Similar incidents frequently find mention in the print and electronic media almost on a daily basis and have been reported even from abroad.

In the July-September 2013 issue of the Hornbill, Dr Asad Rahmani, director of Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), expressed his deep concern over this issue in his editorial ‘Civilian Dogs, Sarkari Dung’, a matter also raised by Dr A T J Johnsingh in a letter to BNHS, asking for ways to resolve this issue. The crisis has manifested in a city such as Delhi in the form of its unmanageable monkey and stray dogs population. In 2014, a leading national newspaper addressed the issue in an article titled, ‘Capital struggling to deal with rising monkey population’ expressing helplessness of the forest department in handling the situation. Despite a ban by the forest department, Delhiites continue feeding them across the city. The forest department has been left wondering how long it will keep translocating monkeys to the only reserved forest of Delhi where there is no conducive environment to house such a huge population of monkeys.