Ashok Kumar
Animal – human conflict is the interaction between animals and man resulting in negative impact on the animals and their habitat or man and his resources.Such conflicts have always occured since prehistoric times as the interests of human and wildlife are often at odds with eachother.These conflicts occur across the globe in both urban and rural areas and may range from encounters with small animals such as rats mongoose etc to large predators such as bears on pets, livestock and humans causing injury or death.India is a country rich in biodiversity with a large species of animals making it their homeland.Thus, animal- wildlife conflicts are inevitable in India in view of rich bio-diverse landscape.In the northeastern region, it is the elephants which wreck havoc by killing and injuring humans and destroying crops and other property causing huge economic loss to the farmers.Our own state is rich in fauna with charismatic animals such as blackbear, snow leopard, hangul, general leopard and many other animals living in our forests.Thus, small and occassional encounters with these animals are inevitable but the most worrying fact is that over the past some time there has been an alarming rise in the incidents of wild animals attacking human beings in our state,especially in the hilly and mountainous regions in our state.Only a few days ago,a seven year old boy was killed by a leopard in village Larh in Reasi district.
The poor victim was lifted while he was sleeping alongwith his mother and elder brother.In the same way,many other people have been attacked while working in the fields or grazing the cattle near or in the forests.Many cases of animal man conflict have been reported from many districts falling both in Jammu and Kashmir divisions.It is not only the human beings who always suffer. Sometimes, the animals are killed by being poisoned .In other cases the wild animals are captured alive or beaten to death mercilessly by the people in retaliation.The reason for this conflict is the deterioration of relationship between humans and wild animals as result of ever expanding human population, clearance of forest land and wasteland for human habitation and other activities leading to the degradation and shrinking of forest area .
The prime habitats of wild animals have also been converted into croplands,orchards and human settlements which,has reduced the prey base of wild animals considerably thus leading to human animal conflict in a big way.The wild animals, especially the black bears and wild cats such as leopards ,cheetahs which,being nocturnal in habit and behaviour, hunt for their prey at night and finding no prey, sneak into human inhabited areas in search of food and water.Studies have shown that number of man-animal conflict increases with the decrease in the distance from the water sources.They often attack in the evening and in the early morning and small children and pet animals are their soft targets.Not only this,the animals such as monkeys also cause a great damage to the standing crops resulting in huge economic losses to the farmers.They are expanding their areas with each passing day with the result that farmers in many villages have stopped growing cereal, pulses and other crops due to the fear of their being damaged and destroyed by the monkeys.Not only this, monkeys bite children and other people and destroy other property, thus making the life of the people miserable.
Thus, it is the duty of the officials of Forest and Wild life Department to take urgent measures to deal with the situation of human animal conflict.Awareness must be created about the behavioural pattern of the wild animals in the people dwellng in settlements along or around the forests and more vulnerable to their attacks.The people need to be advised to move in groups and avoid sleeping in the open or walking alone at night.They ought not to rear pet animals such as dogs which are an easy prey for the wild animals and which attract them to their homes.The concerned department ought to take measures to check such attacks by establishing more pickets in forests and equipping themselves with men and materials such as cages, arms, tranquillisers nets etc. to encage any animal turned maneater.The people also ought to be vacated from the encroached forest lands and not allowed to graze their cattle or take fodder from the forest.Proper fencing should be done to prevent the animals to come into the human habitations.Deep trenches also need to be dug up to keep the animals away from human settlements and thus ,contain man- animal conflict.Forest and wildlife department need to be strengthened and trained to effectively counter this menace.To deal with the monkey menace, the Department of Wild life should launch a compaign to translocate the monkeys to far away from the human settlements.All the wings of the Forest Department need to act in tandem with eachother and also act tough against the timber smugglers and land encroachers operating in forests and responsible for decimation of land and degradation of the habitat for wild animals.
Man- animal conflict is a serious problem and about two dozen people are reported to have lost their lives in our state during the past one year due to the attacks by wild animals.Many others have been seriously injured.Though the government does provide exgratia relief to the next of kin of the person killed in attacks by the wild animals, the loss of human life can never be compensated.An effective strategy needs to be adopted to reduce wildlife- human conflicts.There is need to preserve and conserve forests and provide natural habitat to wild animals so that they donot sneak into human settlements and all- civil society,NGOs,youth and above all, local community residing around the forests must come forward and play their role in conserving forests to prevent unfortunate incidents of man- animal conflict.In other words,man will have to learn to live in coexistence with wildlife in order to provide natural habitat to the wild animals to avoid such attacks.
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