Tagging Leopard by the Tail

• by Pankaj Sekhsaria (pune, india)
• Friday, January 21, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Wildlife biologist Vidya Athreya, lead researcher of Project Waghoba, says her team followed an adult male leopard’s 120-kilometre journey from the hinterlands to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, the green oasis at the heart of India’s commercial capital, Mumbai. The leopard completed its journey in 23 days, crossing densely populated communities, roads, a railway line and finally, swimming across a creek.

The monitoring device was a tiny electronic tag the size of a grain of rice inserted at the base of the animal’s tail.

Lessons from the leopards’s journey are important, Athreya said, because one of India’s main policies in dealing with the conflict between humans and wildlife is to capture the 'problem' animal and relocate it somewhere else.

'Territorial animals like bears, leopards, tigers and even snakes have a strong homing tendency and instinctively try to return to their original area,' explained Athreya. 'When translocated, they are forced to negotiate unfamiliar territory and this actually increases the chances of conflict.'

This first became evident to Athreya and her team in the early years of their research when they studied the incidents at the Yawal Wildlife Sanctuary in the Jalgaon district of Maharasthra. The forests were home to wild animals like the leopard, but were also dotted with human settlements. Yet there had never been a case of conflict reported.

This suddenly changed towards the end of 2003, when newspapers reported a series of six vicious attacks in a two-month period in the region. The attacks stopped only when the Forest Department (FD) put up cages and caught two leopards.

These animals had been earlier captured from the agriculture-dominated landscape of Junnar near the city of Pune as part of a large-scale operation. Labeled 'straying' animals, they were trapped and, as part of existing management policy, moved 400 kilometers to Yawal, where they were released back into the 'wild.'

Before they were released, the leopards had been tagged as part of a pioneering research project by the Maharashtra FD that Athreya and wildlife veterinarian Dr. Aniruddh Belsare were assisting.

Athreya said, 'The identity of the leopards lay in a small rice-grain sized electronic tag that we had inserted at the base of the tail of these animals.' The tag was meant to help track the captured animals after they had been set free.

In that study, Athreya and Belsare had shown that translocating leopards was no solution at all. The animal’s translocation from the area of conflict had in fact caused the conflict to move to new areas, and significantly, to where it had never existed.

Wildlife writer Janaki Lenin, who has also been researching human-elephant conflict, told IPS that 'unless conservation of the species benefits from the translocation, the time, effort and money required is just not worth it.'

Athreya says that a leopard caught after a man-eating case should never be released into the wild. 'It is a much better option to eliminate the animal to reduce threat to humans,' she said in support of the FD’s decision to shoot a problem leopard in her study area in October 2009.

Athreya also points out, however, that just because a leopard is seen among humans does not mean it is a problem animal. 'Our understanding of why otherwise shy wild animals sometimes kill humans is very poor,' she notes, 'and it is important that we try and understand this better.'

That the research project has provided better understanding is shown in the experience of Ashok Ghule, a farmer and field assistant to Athreya’s project. 'Local people don’t mind the leopard if it causes no harm,' he told IPS. 'If there is an attack, however, they want the animal removed by relocation or by permanent caging.'

He said many local people believe that the leopards they find in their area were relocated here by the FD from some other place. The irony is that they are suggesting a similar solution now. 'Most people want an immediate solution and they are not really bothered by what the research study has shown. For them relocation is still a valid solution,' he said.

Veterinarian Belsare told IPS that disease and pathogen transfer is another very important though ignored aspect of translocation in India.

'Even baseline data is lacking,' Belsare said. 'Disease related effects of translocation are almost impossible to document. Unintended spread of diseases like TB and rabies due to translocations has been documented elsewhere.'

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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