Every time I notice that there are peafowl in the garden, I go rushing out, waving my arms and yelling. National bird or not, they are ruthless with seedlings and saplings. (Try growing nasturtiums once the peafowl know you’re attempting to and see how far you get!) And if it’s a band of ruffian rhesus (who recently cold-bloodedly murdered an innocent, young papaya tree while attempting to ravage the banana trees) I often wish I had something like a Gatlin gun or AK-47, because these hoodlums are just as ruthless and indiscriminate.

From here, one just has to extrapolate to fields burgeoning with potatoes or gram or maize or whatever, lovingly cultivated over months, and think of what a sounder of wild boar ( jungli sooar ) or a herd of nilgai , or black buck for that matter, can do in a single night of hard partying. And we’re not talking about ornamental gardens here, but someone’s life-work and daily bread. Naturally, farmers want to declare open season on these creatures, and now the government has allowed them to do so, they say, in specific, affected areas of Maharashtra and Bihar, places where the depredations are greatest.

Of course, no one really bothers to inquire why these animals have stepped out of their forests, and dared to enter the fields in the first place. The answer of course, is that there’s nothing much for them left to eat in the forests — and the fields present much richer pickings. And why is there nothing left in the forests? Because our vast population of skeletal cattle roam at will (and illegally) inside them and have cleaned them all up. Census figures of wildlife population vs livestock in many sanctuaries in India will often look like this: chital: 250, sambar: 100, nilgai 400, wild boar: 300; domestic livestock and goats: 50,000 animals; or something to that effect. So you know who’s eating what and how much, and why the wild animals are helping themselves to our crops.

In the cities it goes a step further, if in a different way. On the Northern Ridge in Delhi (and as in many other cities in India), the population of rhesus macaques has gone through the roof — simply because people throw them papaya and parantha buffets at least twice a week. No one dares do anything radical (trans-locating them simply transfers the problem and the monkeys often take the first train back!) so they’re swarming all over the place, entering homes, raiding fridges and demanding hummus. In Shimla we have finally declared war on the monkeys, and let’s see how far that gets us. But it is all so typical of us: first we ignore a festering issue, and when it goes critical, like a runaway fast-breeder reactor, flap around like headless chickens seeking radical solutions. It’s like ignoring the early stages of cancer and then, when the disease is rampant and the patient’s terminal, trying to nuke it.

That’s why we need to be very wary of this culling business and why it can prove dangerous. We are expert at drafting fine laws, and absolutely zero when it comes to implementing them, or monitoring their adherence. Oh yes, even with this culling decree, there are conditions in place, but, seriously, who the hell is going to consider them? We can’t even obey or implement basic traffic rules effectively (or we wouldn’t have 1.5 lakh people mashed up on the roads every year.) To tell people they can shoot animals at will is akin to putting AK-47s in the hands of toddlers high on sugar and telling them to have fun in the nursery. One might argue, ah, but there are plenty of nilgai and wild boar around, so what’s the problem, but then there were also millions and millions of passenger pigeons around until the last one died in the Cincinnati zoo not so long ago. These birds needed large tracts of forest and wild country to sustain themselves, and once these were invaded and developed, the birds became such a nuisance and threat to farmers that open season was declared on them. In 30 years, they were shot to extinction.

Here, if you get rid of too many wild boar and nilgai , you’ll simply encourage their predators (leopards and tigers) to come sniffing for livestock around villages. (Leopards are already acquiring a taste for Subways and McDonald’s.) Also, today it may be nilgai and wild boar, tomorrow it could be blackbuck and chital and elephant which may be stripped of their protected status and declared ‘vermin’.

So what’s the way out? Theoretically it’s simple: make it more worth the while of these animals to remain in their forests rather than venture into potato or groundnut fields. Ensure that they get all they need to eat in their forests — by discouraging interlopers there.

Perhaps fencing and trenching can be improved and made high-tech so that they are unable to access the fields.

As for me, I know that the best way to discourage garden marauders — simian or not — is to acquire a dog (it worked in the past), but since that’s not practical right now, I’ll just have to keep running out, waving my arms and yelling!

Ranjit Lalis an author and environmentalist

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