Geetanjali Krishna: Taking the life out of the Wild

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

"Till fifty years back, entering the jungles around Mirzapur was fraught with dangers. Even though there were few tigers "" their numbers had been decimated earlier, leopards, bears, wild boar and pythons abounded," said he.

But what the Brits and rajas couldn't accomplish, civilisation did, by populating the animal's habitats with people. Even today, at the Mirzapur Club that dates back to those times, the talk often veers towards the jungle, hunting tales and near misses.

"Wild boars! I still remember the ugly, bad-tempered brutes destroying an entire crop "" eating and running indiscriminately through it!" said our friend, adding that all landed people in those days kept firearms to deal with them. Another friend licked his chops, saying, "they were ugly for sure, but I can never forget the delicious smoked ham we used to make from boar!"

As wild boars were agricultural pests, they added, killing them was more of a social service. This discussion was proving educational, as the talk veered towards Pig Sticking, a blood sport I'd never heard of till then.

I was shown the 60-year-old memoirs of a former district magistrate of Mirzapur, Y D Gundevia, who gave a beautiful description of the game. One could count on finding wild boars in fields covered with waist-high sugarcane or arhar, and that's where Gundevia and friends hunted them on horseback, with spears and bamboo staves.

Another prized trophy was the black sloth bear. Although vegetarian, one angry swipe of its great paw was enough to kill a man. "One could find any number of them in the Kaimur Forests," said our friend.

Tigers never bred in Mirzapur jungles, the sons and grandsons of hunters say today "" they bred in the deeper jungles of Madhya Pradesh, and then came to these forests via the Rihand River to hunt game. But leopards there were aplenty.

And bagging a leopard head was also a great prize, as well as a service to villagers, whose poultry and children were often carried away by these beasts. More often than not, leopards and bears were shot for the sheer sport of it, as is evidenced by their heads, trophies, still mounted grotesquely on the walls of some stately Mirzapur homes today.

There are still areas in Mirzapur where leopards have been sighted occasionally. We saw one, a few years ago, driving on a lonely jungle stretch, just outside Mirzapur.

However, hunting, coupled with the loss of their natural habitat, has caused these wild animals irreparable harm. While earlier they roamed freely in the wilderness, the few that survive today slink and steal to survive.

It is the same story with jackals, blue bulls and chinkara deer. While earlier they thrived in jungles, today their mange-ridden descendants enter arhar fields in large herds, stealing the crop to survive.

And instead of the lush forest cover that used to hide them from human eyes, today they are forced to graze in the open, moving from field to field, braving the sticks of farmers and the speeding vehicles on the highway.

Looking into the glassy eyes of a leopard mounted on the wall, I wondered which option it would have liked more "" to die quickly by the hunter's bullet in the jungle, or painfully, under a truck on the GT Road?