The role of PR is to demystify the interactions between people and crocodiles, and to reduce the risk of crocodile attack through awareness and education. This is what Australia, with the largest population of salties anywhere in the world, does. To reiterate from the author’s previous article in The Wire: “While they do have a trapping and removal program, attack risk in Australia is low largely because of ‘Crocwise’, a public education campaign to reduce the risk of crocodile attacks.”
However, two researchers who penned a rebuttal to that article have erected a straw-man declaring that “crocodiles need management, not PR”. ‘Management’ here is a euphemism for delisting and culling, so there is less science or culture in this solution, and more retribution.
It is not fair to suggest there is a chasm between PR and conservation management. That PR is an important conservation tool is no secret. For example, the Dakshin Foundation, where the authors work, introduces their ‘Environmental Education’ programme on their homepage saying: “By working within the framework of both formal and non-formal educational systems we aim to bridge the growing disconnect between people and their environment”.
The accompanying image features a saltwater crocodile in a mangrove. One might term such programmes as communication, education, awareness, and so on, but this is not PR for the environment.
The authors also insist that “no amount of PR can change what crocodiles do to people”. However, they are being alarmist about the level of threat on the one hand and denying the usefulness of effective and sustainable ways to keep the people safe on the other.
Next, they attempt to dismiss the opposition to delisting and culling as “the ideology of a vocal minority”. While unavoidable at times, one is not obligated to suffer the tyranny of the majority. Conservationists are used to being branded ‘minority’ because this is the sort of response to us criticising authoritarian governments, corporations and other vested interests running roughshod over the environment.
To remind the readers, the administration’s proposal to reduce the legal protection of saltwater crocodiles was reportedly at the behest of the tourism lobby. It is then no small matter that the Dakshin Foundation operates a field station in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in partnership with an organisation at least one of whose trustees has tourism interests here.
And to bolster their argument in support of management, they cite the case of green turtles, whose numbers have reportedly increased at sites around the world and that has resulted in a decline in the quantity of sea-grass, with consequences for fisheries. But what they don’t say is that this was due to the large-scale killing of large sharks, the green turtles’ primary predators. So there is little reason to support the killing of large crocodiles that are also top predators in their ecosystems.
They then draw attention to the ‘innumerable fish, frogs and other lesser known creatures’ in need of conservation. This is noble but the authors don’t explain why this is contingent on culling crocodiles. That’s because it’s not. It is fine to cite distributive justice if they are willing to restore the social carrying-capacity for, or social acceptance of, crocodiles in the rest of the salties’ historic range. They also pepper their argument with terms like ‘tradition’, ‘indigenous’, ‘cultural’, ‘sustainable’ and so on to appear innocuous and make a case for harvesting crocodiles. While irrelevant to the debate on mitigating conflict, it must be noted that local resource use in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is not without its ill-effects – the pitiable case of the dugong and the sorry state of fisheries being just two examples.
The harvest and use of crocodiles for their skin, meat and other products has no doubt been a part of crocodilian management programmes, but it must be noted that their outcomes have varied.
Within the Asia-Pacific region, the successes of Australia and Papua New Guinea in recovering saltwater crocodile populations are often cited in support of the resource exploitation model. However, the legal exploitation of crocodiles has also coincided with the “near-total extirpation” of crocodiles in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and their neighbouring countries in spite of these programmes benefiting “hundreds of farmers, traders and fishers”. The commercial utilisation of crocodiles was, in fact, one of the objectives the Indian Crocodile Conservation Project in the 1970s and 1980s.
But Robert Bustard, who spearheaded the project, realised that “… in a country with such inventive talent as India there can be no adequate safeguard for the wild population – tags, etc., can easily be faked…”. He advised against the exploitation model. It is necessary to recognise the conditions that may allow an ‘exploitation model’ to be sustainable and beneficial to species rather than harm wild populations.
Important among them are a low human population density, extensive habitat that is well protected, and a high standard of legal compliance and enforcement – not exactly the conditions we have in these parts. So tom-toming the exploitation of crocodiles without acknowledging such real-world complexities (e.g. market forces, competing demands for crocodile habitat from other sectors, a mixed and growing human population, etc.) is reckless.
Tarun Nair is a conservation biologist with an affinity towards crocodiles and rivers. He is currently a research associate with ATREE, Bengaluru.