- Small wild cats in India, typically change into victims of retaliatory killing or dislocation as a consequence of misidentification as extra harmful cats.
- Pastoral communities resort to retaliatory killing whereas farmers within the plains mistake cats like rusty-spotted cat, jungle cat, fishing cat and leopard cat cubs for giant cat offsprings and attempt to do away with them.
- In West Bengal, direct persecution is among the main threats the inhabitants of fishing cat is going through.
- Experts stress the need of consciousness campaigns to mitigate the specter of misidentification. Such initiatives have proven promise in decreasing retaliatory killings and fostering coexistence.
In a tiny village of Tardaha Kapasati, in West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas district, volunteers have been handing out papers to the residents. The papers contained photographs of West Bengal’s state animal, the fishing cat, and different fauna present in that space.
Volunteers working with Nature Environment and Wildlife Society (NEWS), have been doing this train to unfold consciousness about the best way to determine the fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus) and never mistake it with its related fauna. This train was a part of a standing survey of fishing cats within the state.
“A lot of people don’t know much about the fishing cat since it is nocturnal and comes out only in the darkness. The residents of the village often mistake them for Indian civet and end up killing them. With this programme we created awareness among people on how to identify a fishing cat and save its population,” Sumit Moulik, one of many volunteers, informed Mongabay-India.
Small wild cats in India, typically change into victims of retaliatory killing or assaults as a consequence of misidentification as extra harmful cats. Pastoral communities resort to retaliatory killing of cats like Eurasian lynx and jungle cats to avoid wasting their livestock, whereas farmers within the plains mistake cats like rusty-spotted cat, jungle cat, fishing cat and leopard cat cubs for giant cat offsprings and attempt to do away with them. Some of the wild cats are additionally unintentionally dislocated by people who’ve empathy and a want to guard the cat however are misinformed of their actions.
In Ladakh, Eurasian lynx is usually mistaken as wolf due to its top and tufted ears. When conservationists Trishna Dutta and Sandeep Sharma and their group first encountered a lynx in Ladakh’s Hemis National Park, their discipline assistant thought it was a purple fox or a wolf.
Similar incident took place when researcher Amit Kotia encountered a Eurasian lynx in Ladakh’s Chushul village at a distance of round 80 metres. Kotia’s “three field assistants were unable to identify the cat and just called it ’shanku, shanku’ (the local name for the Tibetan wolf).”
“Most of the local people confuse the lynx with shanku (wolves) and kill the lynx (to protect themselves and their livestock). Even during the present investigation, local people identified the lynx as shanku,” Kotia wrote in an article.
Mistaking them for giant or home cat
In Gujarat, a group of Wildlife SOS and the Gujarat Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (GSPCA) was just lately apprised of a rescue name relating to a leopard cub, nonetheless, it will definitely turned out to be the offspring of a jungle cat.
Wildlife SOS and GSPCA are concerned in wildlife rescue and function a speedy response unit in Maharashtra and Gujarat, the place the group typically will get rescue calls involving mistaken identities.
According to Raj Bhavsar, mission coordinator at Wildlife SOS and president of GSPCA, the very best focus of cases principally originate from southern Gujarat, particularly close to the Maharashtra-Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh-Gujarat borders.
Read extra: Ladakh’s small cats face useful resource competitors, intimidation by free-ranging dogs
Neha Panchamiya, founder and president of RESQ Charitable Trust, one other organisation concerned in wildlife rescue, highlights the necessity to differentiate between the home cat and wild ones because it helps reunite cubs with their mom in case of abandonment.
RESQ’s operations are targeted on areas outdoors protected forest areas in Maharashtra. They are largely human-dominated agricultural landscapes. According to Panchamiya, they obtain quite a few rescue calls throughout the harvesting season of sugarcane. The calls principally contain rusty-spotted cats, jungle cats, leopards and jackal pups. She says 90% of those calls originate from three districts – Satara, Pune and Nashik.
“In the case of rusty-spotted cats, people mistake them for domestic cats. They take them home and call us one week later, saying that they found it in their field and now realise that it is not a typical cat, it looks like some wild cat. Then, those reunions are next to impossible because the mother has moved on and gone away,” Panchamiya says.
“It is our general observation that rusty spotted kittens, if reunited back quickly, the mother comes back to them, if everything is done correctly on site. If not done quickly, it takes quite some time to reunite them. It takes anywhere from 7 to 10 months to rehabilitate them and reintroduce them back into their habitat,” she says.
In Gujarat and Maharashtra, the cases of retaliatory killing are usually not discovered a lot. However, for the fishing cat in West Bengal, the state of affairs isn’t that beneficial. Direct persecution is among the major threats the inhabitants of West Bengal’s state animal is going through.
“Fishing cats are known as baghrol (fish-eating tiger) in Bengali and when they are small, they look like tiger cubs because of their stripes on the neck. People often mistake them for tiger cubs and resort to retaliatory killing for their own safety. Since these cats are nocturnal, they are often seen near ponds or mangroves at night, so the darkness also plays a role in their mistaken identity,” says Ajanta Dey, Programme Director, Nature Environment and Wildlife Society (NEWS).
Unlike Maharashtra, the circumstances of lesser cat cubs, particularly of the fishing cat being mistaken for the kittens of home cats are hardly present in West Bengal. Dey feels that individuals’s familiarity with home cats within the state and wild traits of fishing cat cubs will be the explanations behind it.
“In West Bengal, almost every household has a cat (domestic) and that’s why people here are very familiar with domestic cats; also, the fishing cat cubs are pretty wild even if they are small, these can be the reason why instances of people mistaking fishing cats with domestic cats are very low,” Dey informed Mongabay-India.
Importance of accelerating consciousness
Experts say that to counter lack of expertise and knowledge on small cats and to avoid wasting them from turning into victims of mistaken id, consciousness can play a vital function. Working with communities, speaking to farmers, and even organising consciousness campaigns may also help on this regard.
“We work very closely with communities and that’s when awareness plays a crucial role. We identify people who know about fishing cats and mobilise them to spread awareness. We have seen that when people know about fishing cats, then they know that it is not harmful for them and they leave it saying that it’s our state animal. But when people don’t know about them, many times they resort to retaliatory killing,” Dey informed Mongabay-India.
For their consciousness marketing campaign, Dey’s organisation makes use of an fascinating identification technique. The group members are proven some images of various species discovered of their space and they’re requested to determine them if they’ve seen them. Most of the individuals verify that they’ve seen these species however are unable to determine them. However, in subsequent camps, persons are in a position to determine and appropriately recall their latest sightings.
Panchamiya highlights ‘the fear of the unknown’ and says, “Anything that is unknown, brings fear for people. The more you tell them about it, they calm down. When we were doing the reunion, there have been times when the locals question it saying, ‘why are you doing all this here?’ It just takes some convincing, we explain to them that it’s a rusty-spotted cat, it’s not a leopard. And then, they agree.”
According to Wildlife SOS, there have been cases up to now the place natives or residents of villages in Maharashtra had mistaken the offspring of a small wild cat to be a leopard cub or a home cat. “However, these were during the early stages of our operation when awareness and education about these species were still sparse. With time, people are now more cautious and many can even distinguish between the cats,” Wildlife SOS informed Mongabay-India in reply to an e mail.
Read extra: Clouded leopards develop methods to outlive competitors
Banner picture: A fishing cat in its habitat in West Bengal. Photo by Sumit Moulik/NEWS.
