Wolves A dar of the north India has spread terror in many villages, which came out of the tall sugarcane crops at night Monsoon season Children sleeping under the open sky are dragged away.
State of Uttar Pradesh At least 10 children were killed and eaten by one of these beasts in Bahraich.
Officials of the forest department say that this case indicates a conflict between humans and animals, and experts believe that the reasons for this are the lack of animal habitat and climate crisis, among other factors.
An official of the forest department told The Independent that an atmosphere of fear prevails in 100 villages at night where the Dara picks up sleeping children and their mutilated bodies are found hours later.
More than 35 poverty-stricken villages in the region have failed to provide shelter for children, who sleep in houses with no doors and sloping roofs in monsoon heat of more than 30 degrees Celsius.
Concerned with the rapidly increasing human-animal conflict, forest department officials are facing difficulties in finding a solution.
His main advice to frightened locals is for parents to keep their children indoors, especially at night when the scarecrow is most likely to come out to hunt.
Indian authorities have captured one of the wolves that attacked the children.
Bahraich forest department officer Ajit Singh says, ‘We first received a report of a missing child on March 18, but we did not find any animal bite marks.
‘In March we received reports of a few mysterious disappearances of children but there was silence for the next three months. With the attack on another child on July 17, people again panicked.’
According to him: ‘We realized that these wolves have got a taste for human flesh and we are in big trouble.’
Ajit Singh says the attacks involved six wolves, including males, who were involved in hunting activities and were seen roaming the fields.
Four of the beasts have been captured while two are still being traced.
He further said that ‘thermal drones, cameras, forests and dozens of personnel are patrolling day and night, searching sugarcane fields, tracking wolves and catching them.
‘We are using the best technology available to take them away from the village.’
Dense sugarcane fields in Bahraich help the wolves to rest and hide completely and make it difficult for the officials to drive them away as about 80% of the fields in Bahraich are sugarcane.
Additionally, environmental factors such as flooding in the nearby Ghaghra River have pushed wolves into villages where they starve as they cannot easily hunt in these areas.
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Local official Monica Rani and rangers of the forest department have started patrolling the area and asked the villagers to sleep indoors at all costs despite the heat.
After the attack on an infant last week, Monika Rani told villagers that ‘people should not sleep in the open, they should sleep inside their houses or on the roofs and be careful for a few days. A pack of wolves is attacking new villages.’
Hours before another child died at the hands of Dar on Monday, he said: ‘We have deployed a significant anti-wolf force in villages where these incidents have occurred or people have been injured, but our challenge is that the wolves are very clever and keep changing their places.’
Villagers are also taking their own precautions. “Whenever we go out, we go in groups, we avoid going anywhere alone at night because there have been so many wolf attacks recently,” a villager told Reuters. have been done.’
Senior forest official Akashdeep Budhwan, who led the drive to find and capture a large wolf involved in the attack, says they are acting on the animal’s basic instinct to find them.
Loudspeakers, floodlights, elephant dung and urine are being used to deter wolves from approaching villagers.
According to him: ‘We used elephant dung and urine to keep wolves away from residential areas. Burning dry dung will create awareness of the presence of elephants in the area and as wolves are shy animals by nature and avoid confrontation.
‘So we are using their instinct to our advantage but the sugarcane fields are very dense which is hampering the thermal reading.’
This is not a common occurrence as there are only three other documented cases where people have had to take such protective measures against wolves and all three occurred in Uttar Pradesh between 1997 and 1999.
Bilal Habib, a senior scientist at the Wildlife Institute of India, who has studied wolves for 24 years, says the animals simply react to circumstances.
At least 10 children have been killed and eaten by wolves in a single pack in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich district (AFP/Screengrab).
Bilal Habib said: ‘The (tall grass) cover around their homes gives wolves the opportunity to get closer to human populations, which gives rise to these types of situations or events.
‘Once a wolf realizes that it is easy to take human children, they can then make a habit of it.’
He further said that it is not because this animal has decided to kill humans but because of the circumstances that give them an opportunity to take advantage of children.
Bilal said that once wolves are caught and authorities prove that they were behind the deaths of children, these animals should be released far away from human populations.
According to him: ‘More than 90% of Indian wolves live close to humans but if human-animal conflict escalates, the villagers will probably kill all the wolves near the village with poison, but we cannot prevent this from happening. Should.’
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2024-09-04 16:12:20
