Tigers that recently killed people in India
Close to the foothills of the Himalaya four tigers ventured out of forests and killed 11 people in the past five months. The killings have challenged the official understanding of man-eaters. Unlike the man-eaters of Kumaon Jim Corbett wrote about, these were not rendered incapable of hunting by either old age or injury. All four tigers were young; two were adolescents.
The 10-year-old tiger - they usually life for 14-15 years in the wild-in Corbett National Park killed Bhagwati Devi of Dhikuli village in the buffer zone of the park on February 6 when she went into the forest to collect firewood. The villagers said the tiger attacked the 50-year-old from behind as she sat collecting wood. Following protests by people, the chief wildlife warden of Uttarakhand issued orders to kill or catch the “man-eater”. The forest department trapped the animal and sent it to a zoo in Nainital on February 10.
Bhagwati Devi’s husband B C Nainwal, however, does not blame the tiger. “It is the policies of the government that made the tiger a victim of public ire,” he said. “The tiger was roaming near Dhikuli for four-five months. The main reason was elephant safaris by resorts here. They are known to throw meat in front of the tiger to increase the sighting of the big cat.” Continue reading »
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Hello World-Welcome to Wildandhappy.org
Hey People,
Welcome to “Wild and Happy”
First the name (there is a lot in the name!)
Why are we “wild and happy”? I was desperately hunting for a good name for my blog and was frustrated that anything I thought about had already been taken. So, there was Rooted.com, wildernessredefined.com, .org, etc, etc, etc. Imagine the dent to my creativity! And then this friend, whom I had asked to suggest me a name, announced that he is starting a blog by the name, “Wild and Happy.” How incorrigible one could be? I asked him to suggest a name for my blog, and there he was, starting his own. This act demanded revenge. And Ladies and Gentlemen, here is our blog: “Wild and Happy.” Don’t worry, this is not stolen, the friend will be a regular contributor here and I have promised to give him another name for his blog (that is when he feels like posting!).
Wild and happy is a lot about environment and wildlife and all the more about personal experiences while dealing with these issues. We are not going to preach about global warming, pollution, save forests…blah…blah…blah. It is more about the people dealing with these problems and learning to modulate to deal with them, about the people who suffer due to them and how easily we have chosen to ignore them, how we have great figures to quote when making a presentation about impact of pollution, etc,etc, but not the faces of everyday life heroes who brave these problems and are happy in their adversity.
And it is about personal experiences that you and I encounter when we go places and look at these problems from the other side. You are all welcome to share really wild experiences, of places and situations where you thought you were really stuck but did come back, alive and HAPPY. Everything that surrounds you is environment, so feel free to share anything and everything you think is important for lives around you to know. Or something they already know but never voice!
Through this, I also want to share my experiences of Indians and the country we live in (I have deliberately put it the other way round) that are mostly based on my travel assignments as an environment journalist besides the stories that I do for my publication.
So, here we go!
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No Return of The Native
Wizened old Jidemadamma has to depend on her neighbours for meals. Her son and daughter-in-law have gone to Kodagu to collect pepper from trees and will not be back before two weeks. They took the children along because I cannot move around much. Earlier, all of us stayed together here. Now there is nobody, says the septuagenarian, sitting outside her hut in Kaneri Colony, one of the 62 hamlets in Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple (BRT) Wildlife Sanctuary in southern Karnataka.
Jidemadamma is among the few Soligas, an indigenous community, left in the hamlet. Soligas, literally meaning the bamboo children, are known for their environment-friendly practices and sustainable collection of minor forest produce. But most have migrated in search of livelihood since the government banned collection of non-timber forest produce ‘honey, lichen, amla, soapberry and soapnut’ their main source of income, about two years ago. Same is the story in other hamlets inside the sanctuary in the Western Ghats. Continue reading »
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Census on Captive Elephants in Karnataka
A study on captive elephants has concluded in Karnataka. The first-of-its-kind study aims to take into account all aspects of management regimes and health care of captive elephants in India and create a database.
“Inventory of existing captive elephants will help us know the facilities they have in terms of health care, nutrition and training. We will then come up with a set of guidelines towards effective management of captive elephants,’
says Raman Sukumar, the founding trustee of Asian Nature Conservation Foundation (ancf). ancf along with the Bangalore-based ngo Compassion Unlimited Plus Action (cupa), initiated the study.
After the study, a manual has been prepared in Karnataka. It contains body measurement, dung circumference and weight, details of space, water, bath, interaction, training, behaviour and veterinary doctor’s availability for 158 captive elephants in the state along with their mahuts and their socio-economic status, Suparna Baksi Ganguly, vice president of cupa, said.
“The social status of mahuts is very low. The government doesn’t want to build infrastructure for them. We need to raise their standard of living so that they take interest in the animal,’ says Sukumar.
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