Tiger Tiger Burning Bright?

Tiger tiger burning bright,

In the forest of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

On xx April 2009, a photograph in my inbox reminded me of how wrong this poem was.

The hills around the Madhei jungle are called Vageri, because there was a time not too long ago when this area resounded with the roar of tigers, really a misnomer now as there are possibly no tigers surviving here anymore. I celebrated the fact like many others, when photographs of pug marks and a buffalo kill were posted on ‘Wildgoa’, an online wildlife community, by a Goan naturalist. This was finally a tiger that we could finally call our own, not just some stray cat that could have visited us seasonally during the summer months from the neighboring State’s jungles.

It’s not uncommon for people to set up snares to be set up along known animal tails. A rusty loop of wire hanging in thickets is a simple but effective means of trapping an animal as it lassoes itself unknowingly, the noose tightening as it struggles to get away. The death is slow and painful as the same strength used to get away is translated; tightening of the wire loop steadily. Usually set up for wildboar, and really lucky if a defenseless deer gets caught. However the poachers luck would have definatly run out when a tiger got caught instead. In this case the powerful predator pulled so hard that the wire dug into the flesh, tearing it, before death put it out of its misery. But no one see’s this, the animal almost always has a lonely death. It’s not common that a very cunning predator would have fallen for the snare, call it bad luck, but then snares are unbiased on who walks into them. In the past leopards have been snared, but no feline can capture one’s imagination as much as the picture of a dead snared tiger, especially if you are the only tiger around. The carcass has since disappeared in a bid to the hide evidence and a tight knit village community will take a while to divulge the actual trend of events for fear of a repercussion. While it sure is a deliberate case of poaching, it can only be speculated if they specifically trying to target the tiger and not a boar or deer. But what bugs me is how could someone get a snare set inside known tiger country? Wild boars are not vermin or agricultural pests, and no one does a service by hunting them. These are the main prey base for our big cats, and the next time you hear of a leopard or a tiger prowling your neighborhood, please ask yourself or your neighbour who regularly dines wild boar at social gatherings if he is are part of a the problem, instead of the being the solution. Laws cannot be implemented if we deliberately decide to break them, and then its pointless pointing fingers to the enforcers for not doing anything. Poaching is a problem and we have to deal with it; because the enforcers this time, the Forest Department, failed miserably! We need to realize that any kind of poaching is against the law even if it means killing and eating deer, boar or even just one bull-frog this monsoon.

It’s not surprising that the government machinery has made a sauntered approach to a potential crisis. Illegal mining is not the backbone of Goa’s economy, nor will diverting a river to agricultural land quench any parchedness. We have not realized that the consequences will be disastrous, for the entire jungle may just wither away. A healthy forest keeps our 2 main rivers flowing, and our climate in check, and this is what supports all life right up to the urban centers of Panjim and Margao. So we cannot allow any politicians to possibly covertly parcel off any of our jungle as a mining lease to a cutthroat moneymaker.

Madhei is a virgin rainforest teeming with endemic species that cloak our hinterland. There are pitcher plants, gliding frogs, mygalomorphs (similar to tarantula’s), and bats to name a sprinkling that are found nowhere else on earth. Luckily there are a growing number of young men, women boys and girls, who are willing to scramble up hills, get stung by insects, bitten by snakes and sucked by leaches, but as I know, it is a thoroughly worthwhile to be in such a lush jungle such as Madhei. These are not people who use activism as a tool to acquire monetary benefits; they do this for their love of the land and because deep down we all know how intrinsically linked we are to Mother Nature. The groundwork they did; working with rural village communities, rescuing wildlife, creating awareness, is only by sheer dedication and earnestness over the years because it would hurt immensely for any goan to say that we didn’t know and hence didn’t protect. We do not need to speculate about the fateful day when the poachers used a cell phone to take a picture of a dead tiger in his snare, but more importantly on what can be done to create awareness of a treasure trove that we have up in the hills. The fact that large carnivores can survive in Madhei suggests that it is still a healthy jungle, and we need to keep it that way.

It may take the gruesome picture of a dead tiger to make you revolt if not question what is wrong? But the fact is that not only Madhei but the jungles of Cotigao, Netravalli and Mollem are habitat for big cats. It maybe difficult trying to convince a city politician to see the sense in protecting the Malabar Gliding frog, a green frog that lives all its life up in the trees, spreading its bright pink-red toe webbing like a parachute, as it glides from branch to branch or a mygalomorph the size of a dessert plate that lives in a tunnel lined with web set like trip-wire, has an inch long fangs and a toxic venom that probably could revolutionize modern medicine; both to name a few endemic to our jungle in the Western Ghats. But instead we could hope to get our jungle protected for the sake of possibly the other tiger and the many leopards that still lurk, because when we protect them we are also protecting every other fascinating creature that we haven’t yet discovered. Hopefully in its death the tiger will serve us an example to get us to stand up to mark a beginning rather than an end. Are you up for it?