Conservation India

Preamble

They say the path to hell is paved with good intentions, and that is certainly true of this subject. Here is how it typically plays out: a well-meaning villager finds a tiny tiger or leopard cub at the edge of a jungle. Believing it to be abandoned, he takes it to the nearest Forest Office, where a well-meaning Forest Officer takes pity on the helpless but adorable orphan, and decides to raise it with the help of a well-meaning NGO. 18 months later, when the cub is nearly full-grown, unmanageable and expensive to care for, the surrogate parents decide that the noble thing to do is to return it to its “rightful home”, the jungle. The problem is, the hand-raised cat has no idea how to survive in this alien place. Some days or weeks after being “set free”, the lost, starving and disoriented predator pounces on an unsuspecting human, inflicting horrendous injuries or death. The victim’s enraged kin attack the local forest office in retribution and, under tremendous pressure, the Forest Department is forced to shoot the cat or capture it and send it to a zoo. The photographs below depict one such incident from Karnataka, which has since stopped the practice of releasing captive big cats into the wild. However, more such releases are being contemplated in other states, and, in all probability, more poor and powerless local people will die as a result.

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