Dogs on farms

I’m convinced that dogs are not outdoors animals. People living on farms commonly make the mistake of assuming that their dogs would thrive in all that space. Dogs probably do but this lifestyle comes with several dangers. One of the major causes of dog mortality in farms is snakebite. If they are not trained to leave snakes alone early in life, they may try to attack and get bitten. Even ones that are trained (like mine) can tread on a snake by mistake and get bitten. Since the dogs live outdoors, owners usually notice the symptoms too late and even then, aren’t quite sure what is wrong with their pets. I learnt this lesson the hard way.

For more than 10 years, my dogs lived outdoors. When any of them was under the weather, I would call the vet and she would invariably ask what the poop looked like. I never knew where the dog in question had evacuated so was never able to give a satisfactory answer on which the vet could base her diagnosis. I usually discovered stomach upsets too late and only when the dog stopped eating. And then there were ticks, motherloads of them. Guests would spend all their time pulling them out and the little terrors lost no time at all in re-colonizing. We lost a dog to a suspected cobra bite and we could do too little too late. And then three years ago, a leopard moved in and snacked on one of the others. Finally the penny dropped or I became too paranoid. Farms may be gardens of Eden but they is many a snake hiding in the foliage (snake being a metaphor for danger).

For three years now, our dogs have lived indoors and go out on "walks", no different from apartment living dogs. Now I catch every little health issue before it becomes serious, there are no ticks, I can prevent them from eating undesirable food item (like monkey poo) besides making sure that no leopard snatches them away. Unwittingly, I also solved a long standing problem – the dogs killing local wildlife.

Dogs hunt anything that runs or crawls. I maintained a log book of animals they killed – several orange-headed ground thrushes, squirrels, monitor lizards, young toddy cats, and so on. I yelled and screamed, whacked and threatened to no avail. Then I bought an electric shock collar and figured that the gizmo would solve my problem. Every time I saw the dog-being-trained look at a bird with evil intent, I punched the remote and the dog got a pulse of electric shock. The trouble was you had to be watching all the time which was practically impossible with outdoor dogs. Sometimes I’d come home to find a dog mouthing a dead bird and I’d zap him/her. Unfortunately the message they got was “never be seen with a dead bird or animal.” So the killings continued but I didn’t know who the culprit was. To be effective, I would have to zap them in the process of hunting, otherwise the message was getting garbled. Friends advised that I was going against nature and dogs could not be trained to stop hunting. I rationalized and justified the dogs’ behaviour – “they are after all confined to the garden while the wildlife have the rest of the farm.” Excuses, excuses.

Once the dogs became indoor dogs, the killing stopped. Now there are crow-pheasants, partridges, hares, porcupines and toddy cats crossing the garden during the day or night. The dogs love being indoors and close to us too. If we are in the living room, they curl up in some corner and when the action shifts to the kitchen, they move with us.

The unintended consequence of this is that the monkeys have become emboldened. They know that the dogs are indoors and there is no one to watching the garden. The only fruits of our labour that we can enjoy are citrus. So now I’m resigned to seeing tender mangoes littering the ground, big bites taken out of guavas that aren’t mature. Should anything miss the monkeys’ eyes, the sharp fruit bats get. Well, that’s what I wanted, was it not? I can’t want wildlife in the garden, and expect that they will respect my ownership of it. I've finally found a balance to keeping my beloved dogs and enjoying wildlife.

Summer heat brings out the best in our garden!

The heady perfume of the flowers is finally wearing off. For weeks now, we have had a succession of trees in blossom. It started with the heavy perfume of neem in April, followed by the sweet smelling Indian laburnum. The most surprising (for me) were the Terminalias – bellerica and arjuna – their blossoms are honey-scented. This the first time that our 10 year old trees have produced flowers so profusely. Some were not even that old. Neem trees, no more than 5 feet tall, virtually babies, were flowering! Surprisingly bellerica had just finished fruiting in March and it went into flower production quickly. The jamuns are also flowering their hearts out but apparently without fragrance. The oriole babies will be in time for the glut of neem fruits and then there are jamuns to be had in August. It may be the hottest time of the year, but it is the most productive for birds, trees, and bees.

Magpie-robins see off ratsnake

The sharp discordant alarm call of the magpie-robins shook me out of my morning preoccupations. “Why are the magpies calling” I yelled downstairs to Rom. A moment later, he answered, “There’s a ratsnake going for their nest.” I hurriedly grabbed the camera and binoculars and went out. Just outside the porch, between the frond stalks of a stunted coconut tree, a pair of magpie-robins have nested every summer. We knew they had fledglings as the parents had begun making frequent visits with little insects in their beaks. I walked around the tree in a wide arc, not wanting to add to the disturbance and provide anyone with undue advantage. The ratsnake was not clearly discernible among the vines dripping around the tree so there was going to be no picture. The birds dive-bombed, and pecked the ratsnake to dissuade it from exploring any further. The snake was immobile for a few moments at a stretch and I wondered if he was swallowing the fledglings. No, his head came up too soon and he continued exploring. Eventually the birds gave up on their assault and disappeared. The snake too lost interest and left the tree. I just couldn’t be sure that the fledglings were safe and just barely suppressed the desire to get a ladder and peek in. A couple of hours later, the birds were back to ferrying little insects to the nest.

Media and the gharial crisis

The gharial crisis has been an opportunity to study how the media reports on a wildlife situation of which I had a ringside seat. The facts of the matter are simple: more and more gharial have been dying on a short stretch of the Chambal since the first week December 2007. Speculation has repeatedly dwelled on pollution, parasites and epidemic disease. In the absence of any new develepment (except the rising mortality figures) what are the ways a reporter can tell the story. In some cases, they merely report just that and add a reminder that a definitive cause is yet to be ascribed. But a few go further - they impute conflict and twist words to make new stories. Don't believe me? Here are the examples -

Take the AP wire which creates unnecessary conflict between conservation agencies where there was none. The reporter says that the Gharial Conservation Alliance’s (GCA) figures conflict with the Chief Wildlife Warden’s (CWW) and the actual death toll is unclear. If he had asked the GCA or the CWW further he would realize that the GCA was providing the total figure whereas the CWW of Uttar Pradesh was providing the figures for his state. The other side of the river is Madhya Pradesh where gharials are dying too. And being a wire service, it was picked up by newspapers around the world.

But the worst of the lot is Mail Today who has run 2 pieces to date – on the 22nd and 26th Jan (today). While the 22nd piece was all right, much damage was caused by today's piece. Two days ago, a WWF colleague called to say that during an interview the reporter quoted Rom as saying that the something was wrong with the blood samples taken from the captive gharial at the Morena captive breeding facility in Madhya Pradesh. Rom, however, had never said anything like that; he had said that we needed to draw blood samples from the captive gharial so we have our baseline blood values against which to compare the blood values of the diseased gharial on the Chambal. So Rom emailed her (24th Jan) clarifying the issue and adding that blood samples from the Morena gharial were not even drawn yet. But Ms Reporter steams straight on and publishes complete untruth as fact and to add insult to injury puts it within quotes.

The Forest Department is everyone's favourite whipping horse. When they do work with other agencies however, they are not creditted for it. This fragile cooperation between government authorities, NGOs, and labs is working to get to the bottom of this tragic die-off. At the best of times, these are uneasy partners and under a crisis the over-riding concern for the animals has provided a rare moment of cooperation. If the media were to poison this important camaraderie, they are doing much more harm than any good for the gharial. Besides, when all these agencies are working together, setting aside differences, why cannot the media set aside its pettiness and act responsibly? Is it so hard to be fair and balanced? Why cannot praise be given where it is due just as much as criticism?

Millipedes mating

Found in the garden this morning at 10 am. I have seen millipedes mating before but have never seen the white translucent mating organ (is it?) before. You can see it about an inch below the head of the millipede, near the withered grass blade.

The 180° Separation

When the Europeans arrived on the shores of America, it was a vast land teeming with animals. In their pursuit of agriculture and animal husbandry, land was cleared and wild animals destroyed. A couple of centuries later, wolves, bears, mountain lions, coyotes, bison had all been wiped out throughout most of the continent to make way for progress. During the 1900s, with the realization that these animals were in danger of extinction, large tracts of wilderness were set aside for conservation. The protected areas were devoid of humans and the wardens who policed the protected territory were focused mainly on prevention of poaching. The assumption underlying this model is that people and wildlife do not and cannot share the landscape; where one exists, the other cannot. Endangered species recovered and we pretty soon had this philosophy of conservation making inroads around the world.

In colonized countries, such as India, this Western model was imposed. However, we neither have the vast tracts of land that can be set aside for conservation nor are there forests devoid of humans. So began the process of making the entire country fit into the model – relocation of people living in forest areas. Despite Independence, we continued the colonial policy of further marginalizing an already marginalized people believing it to be in the greatest interest of beleaguered wildlife. And we have more often failed than succeeded. The amount of money and other resources thrown into achieving this has been so pitiful as to render the policy a failure.

On the flip side of the “undisturbed forests” principle is an extremely intolerant attitude to wildlife. Despite being one of the most populous nations in the world, India does not have such a violent history of wildlife extermination as the West had (tigers were declared vermin and official tiger slayers employed by the British). People have lived and continue to live in some really dangerous country. A spate of sheep-killing incidents is all that a Western nation needs to indict the suspected predator as vermin. In India, we have dangerous animals across the country living off livestock and crops. Children get killed by wolves and leopards, people get killed by crop-raiding elephants. In the absence of any management policy to deal with these situations quickly and scientifically, horrific retaliatory killings of animals occurs but by and large people have tended to be tolerant and philosophical about their loss. Ironically, instead of teaching the world a thing or two about coexistence, we are instead learning how not to live with wildlife.

A retired forester narrated an incident that occurred in Kanha in the 1950s. A tiger had killed a little boy and when the forest officials retrieved the body, the father of the son said, “Leave him there. It's only because the tiger didn't have anything else to eat that he took my son. At least let him eat so his belly is full.” The forester said it shook him to hear those terrible words just as it shook me nearly fifty years later.

If we promote the concept of inviolate forests as the only redemption of wildlife in the country, are we also not implying that the countryside is safe only if it is devoid of king cobras, leopards and wolves? Biologists have reported that our protected areas are too small, few and far between to protect our wildlife in the long term. More than half of India's leopards are found outside forests, elephants routinely raid crops and yet, we are banking perhaps too much on wedging a sharp divide between people and wildlife. Is this 180° separation what we want? Are we ready for the day when our little bits and pieces of forest are the only remaining islands of wildlife? Would we have achieved positive conservation action by such division?

A lot of conservation action has focused on educating people, and appealing to their goodwill. And yet, our politics of conservation instead focuses on eroding the traditional tolerance, a tolerance that is credited for the continued presence of much of our wildlife and forests in the 21st century. What is our answer to people who demand that all crop-raiding elephants, nilgai, and blackbuck be exterminated, that all leopards found outside forests be shot? Are frightened people justified in killing king cobras found in their houses and plantations? Do we then preach coexistence?

Stung by a scorpion

About a fortnight ago, a few of us camped on a riverbank (River Denwa) near Pachmarhi. It was a scenic spot – a lovely beach that was overshadowed by a cliff face. As we lay on the sandy beach looking up at the cliff watching the evening sun cast interesting shadows, we tried to make out faces and creatures. Swiftlets were nesting, rock bee hives hung precariously (I looked nervously behind at the forest wondering if it would provide cover should a buzzard set off the bees) while pigeons strutted on bare ledges. It was a gorgeous spot – one that we had hiked down a steep slope for an hour to get to. As night fell the breeze turned cold and despite the various layers of clothing I was freezing.

That night Rom and I found a sheltered spot to sleep but the wind got through the flimsy blanket. We hadn't thought to take sleeping bags on the trip. Although it seemed like we hadn't slept, we rose feeling refreshed. We lazed on the beach, watching the sunlight change the mood of the rock wall and soon it was time to go. I was walking barefoot on the sands packing our things when I stumbled from pain. Something had jabbed me. Clutching my little toe and wondering what thorn could have scratched me so sharply, I turned around to see the poised tail and sting of a scorpion sticking out of the sand. Our field man advised stamping my foot hard on the rock a couple of times but I knew that one doesn't do anything like that with snakebite and I presumed that the logic was the same for scorpion sting. Rom scooped out the creature and it was the dreaded Mesobuthus tamulus – I have no idea what it's common name is. It's a small reddish plump scorpion that we stay clear of at home. Ironically it had got the only Tamilian in the group!

I sat down with the leg stretched out waiting for the symptoms to appear. Since it was an extremity I knew I was in no danger but I didn't want to aggravate it before a long climb up rocks back to civilization. Little children have died from this scorpion sting and an Irula snake catcher who had been stung in the armpit went into peripheral circulatory failure – he went blue. So although it was a blazing Madras summer, he was shivering cold and Rom said they had to light a fire and rub him vigorously to warm him up. In an hour, his eyes, that had rolled back, became normal and he slowly recovered.

We thought it strange that the scorpion was buried in the sand. I conjectured perhaps he was on the sand and I had stepped on him, pushing him under. I shuddered to think that anyone of us could have been stung on the face or head as we lay sleeping not very far. Slowly the pain crept up my leg – first the inner side of the shins and then the groin. I cursed myself quietly – I had been a stupid ass for not looking where I put my foot. All I can say in defense is that I had never expected to see a scorpion on a sandy beach. Rom said the pain wasn't going to climb up any higher. Half an hour later I was still in pain and couldn't put any weight on that leg. Classic symptoms of the lymphatic system being affected. There was no point in waiting any longer. I got a stick and hobbled along the river bank. The cold river made the pain worse as I crossed it. While we cleaned our feet and put on our shoes, Pradip mentioned that there was a doctor in the village. I said that he couldn't help much except prescribe painkillers. Why hadn't I said so earlier? Golu had some and I popped a pill. Within a few minutes I was much better. Then I popped another just to preempt the pain. Rom worried that I might not be able to balance on the huge boulders – he was drawing some bizarre connection between driving heavy machinery and hiking up rocks.... Anyway it wasn't a problem. By this time I could carry my rucksack and managed to scramble up to the road to the car.

Later the doctor said he would treat scorpion stings with antihistamines and painkillers. I had refused antihistamines because there was no allergic reaction. When I went to bed that night, I could not bear any pressure on it. I was surprised when I woke up the next morning – absolutely no pain or any residual discomfort. The venom had run its course and left me no worse after 24 hours. I had never been stung or bitten by anything more venomous than an ant before and this was an interesting first experience.

I mentioned the sting experience to our friend Ashok and the first question he asked was “Were you stung at the spot where you had dinner the night before?” I answered incredulously “yes.” Ashok explained that he has noticed “lots of scorpions” milling about dinner leftovers at camps. I thought may be the scorpions were hunting the insects that were feeding on the scraps. Ashok said “No,” they seemed to be scavenging like crabs. Interesting!!