The Indian cheetah was hunted into extinction by British colonists and the Indian royalty. Their sense of entitlement was so great that by 1947, we had no cheetahs left. Today, thanks a similar sense of entitlement, we are close to decimating another great cat – the leopard.
India’s leopard population at present is around 12,000, according to data provided by the Wildlife Conservation Society of India. From this lot, we have already lost 280 leopards in 2018, 90 of which were killed by poachers alone. Another 22 were killed by villagers in human-leopard conflicts. Other agents include road accidents and, of course, natural causes.
Uttarakhand has the most leopards of any Indian state. It’s also #1 in the number of leopards killed. Although the state has existed for less than 18 years, forest department officials have calculated that it lost over 100 leopards last year alone out of a total estimated population of 2,600.
The celebrated hunter Jim Corbett shot several man-eating tigers and leopards in the hills in parts of India that today fall in Uttarakhand. However, man-eating leopards were rare. It is in in fact in the last two decades that an increasing number of humans were attacked by leopards: 140 leopards and tigers have been declared man-eaters since the state’s formation.
Shrinking habitat is the main reason leopards are compelled to enter semi-urban and urban area. In 2017 alone, according to the Forest Survey report, 778 sq. km of forest that acted as a buffer between the jungle and villages in Uttarakhand was cut to make way for the all-weather Chardham road.
According to the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI), Uttarakhand has already reported 30 leopard deaths this year, the highest among states, followed by Maharashtra with 25 deaths.
Tito Joseph, a program coordinator at the WPSI, blames state government officials for such high mortality rates. “Villagers put pressure on politicians to declare leopards as man-eaters and [politicians] have to please their constituency,” he said. “Forest officials have no choice but to listen to their political masters. This is not to say that humans lives have also not been lost in man-leopard conflicts.” It is important to note that leopards do not primarily prey on humans. “Deforestation has forced leopards to move closer to human settlements in search of cattle and also dogs, who they see as easy prey.”
Bina Kak, a former Rajasthan environment and forests minister who helped sanction the Jawai Bandh Leopard Conservation Reserve, today home to 50 leopards, said. “A leopard does not harm anyone till he is really hungry. We need to ensure that their prey base is not depleted.”
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Another problem is forest fires. “Unlike tigers, leopards are not a conservation priority for the government. They are treated like a nuisance,” Belinda Wright, who heads the WPSI, told The Wire. “If we are not careful, there will be only two or three left” before we know it.
In December 2016, the Uttarakhand high court had ordered a ban on the killing of tigers, leopards and panthers even as government officials were declaring the presence of this or that man-eater. The court had maintained that such animals should be confined in zoos for short periods before being returned to their natural habitats. Finally, it also clearly stated that state governments were not allowed to engage private hunters to kill these animals.
The Uttarakhand government took the matter up to the Supreme Court, which overturned the ban.
As a result, leopards are being declared man-eaters with impunity, some activists have alleged, even as forest officials have issued strongly worded denials.
A senior forest official clarified that a man-eater is declared at the chief wildlife warden’s station in Dehra Dun by invoking the Wildlife Protection Act 1972. The process has become somewhat more difficult since leopards were classified as ‘vulnerable’ by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
On the other hand, replies to RTIs filed by various people show that, in the last 13 years, 166 leopards and 16 tigers were declared man-eaters in Uttarakhand. in 2017 alone, 16 big cats were declared threats to human lives. One RTI reply also stated that hunters had gunned down 45 leopards declared man-eaters between 2006 and 2016.
D.V.S. Khati, the chief wildlife warden of Uttarakhand, has stated lifting the ban was justified because, when a conflict is reported, it is the department that has to face tremendous criticism. In one incident, on March 23, a four-year old boy was killed by a panther. When the boy’s half-eaten body was recovered the next morning, angry villagers set fire to eight hectares of van panchayat land and refused to let anyone extinguish the blaze, especially since this had been the second such incident in the area.
A part of the problem, according to Qamar Qureshi, a wildlife biologist with the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehra Dun, is a tendency to linearise every debate. “We need to have a dispassionate approach to this problem. The forest department is following the wrong management approach when they try and put these [leopard man-eaters] back into forests. They need to be captured and removed from the system. We can’t forget that if we alienate the local people, we will not be able to do any conservation,” he said.
He also pointed to the fact that forests outside protected areas have shrunk in size, effectively flushing out their leopard populations because they can no longer sustain the presence of the big cats. “The most important task ahead for us is to turn these forests around, which is a long, uphill [task]. We must not forget that both our animals and the poor are sustained by our forests.”
Vidya Athreya, a Maharashtra-based ecologist specialising in the study of human-animal conflicts, insists we need to devise a long-term mitigation plan to end the human-leopard conflict for good. She is currently helping the Uttarakhand forest department adopt a similar strategy for the Tehri and Pauri districts.
“The Uttarakhand government is also collaborating with the German government to come up with ways to mitigate conflict and increase co-existence between humans and wild cats,” Kak said. “But with Indian forests depleting rapidly thanks to unplanned ‘developmental’ projects, the wildlife population is only set to decrease.”
Rashme Sehgal is an author and a freelance journalist based in Delhi.