INTO THE WILD: WHEN ANIMALS COME CALLING

In India, people share land with wild animals, millions of cattle and stray dogs. The relationship is complicated

- Rahul Chandran

In May 2018, 11-year-old Shavani was attacked and mauled-allegedly by a stray dog when she stepped outside her house in Uttar Pradesh's Tikariya village.

Three years earlier, in May 2015, Rampal Saini, a forest guard in Rajasthan's Ranthambore National Park, was preyed upon, allegedly by a male tiger-locally known as Ustad or the master-whose territory included the area where Saini was killed.

And in Tamil Nadu's Kanchipuram district, a farmer was bitten by a snake when he was gathering hay for his cattle. For a while, said Gnaneswar Ch, a herpetologist with the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust who questioned the man's companion, the victim thought he had scratched his hand against a nail. But after about 10 minutes, his companion saw a spectacled cobra nearby. By then, the man had begun to show snakebite symptoms. He was taken to a local faith healer and, when that didn't work, rushed to a local hospital where he was administered 20 vials of antivenin. The farmer succumbed, just a couple of hours after being admitted.

The three incidents, despite the different species of animals involved (India in 2022 had an estimated 3,682 tigers, about 60-80 million stray dogs and nobody has counted the number of snakes), share one commonality: the reality of human-animal conflict in India.

Apart from tigers, dogs and snakes, 1.4 billion Indians share this land with an estimated 307 million cattle, the only surviving population of Asiatic lions, growing numbers of the Asian elephant and leopards, among other animals.

The US, the world's third most populous country, has 336 million in an area that is seven times larger.

CONFLICT COUNTRY