Over the years I've had a lot of conversations about big cats and wildlife in general, thousands I guess. Project work requires a lot of extraction of information combined with the physical element of hundreds of kilometres of walking, often up very steep slopes. Sometimes I can go a few days without talking to anyone, sometimes there can be long conversations deep into dark early morning hours discussing strategy. It can mean talking to policy makers, it can mean off the cuff conversations in the middle of nowhere when a friend on horseback appears. Sometimes I need to wait until prayers are finished while at other times it can be an online conversation when a tweet provokes someone into action.
Big cats evoke a lot of different feelings, so varied among many different people. There is love, there is hate. There is joy, there is tragedy. There is indifference, there is passion. There is bullshit, there is action. I document as much as I can, constantly learning. The more I find out, the less I know...
Yesterday I made a couple of posts online, the first being my blog about how information regarding wild big cats has to be carefully managed, there are serious security problems if information falls into the wrong hands. The second post was a link to a BBC Earth article about why people poach endangered animals. On some forums it evoked nothing, on others it evoked a lot of feeling.
For me it evokes one simple raw real conversation. Quite simply we are working our guts out to hold the situation as best possible until there is a major wake up and the world finally addresses poverty. By poverty I don't just mean money in pockets, I mean the wealth of mind through education, the wealth of body through adequate health care. Right now I'm frantically raising funds so the son of a friend can have his life saving operation paid for, something I shouldn't have to be doing if there was a decent system in place. Over the next week I go into long hours for the wildlife rescue and conflict mitigation practices desperately needed here, based around the leopard but extending far beyond. These are issues that in 2016 should have been addressed a long time ago but the sheer fact this nation is impoverished in policy, mind and for many millions financially, it means this constant battle.
Often I feel caught between two worlds. There is the over consuming west which has done incredible environmental damage. Then there is the under performing areas like this one, ironically wanting to go down the same path as the west but in general not motivated enough to pick up the ever growing rubbish being tossed on the ground.
I feel that somewhere between the two worlds is some sort of truth and hope, the raw reality that yes we can get it right. I wonder how the big cats see it because despite our many different attitudes towards them they too are caught in the middle of all this, facing their own raw reality.
So despite all the different attitudes we must continue to work as hard as hell until that wake up eventuates. At the moment I hear a lot of people talking about it but as I settle into a long day's work ahead it would be good to see more of that talk turned into action... Jai Bagh.
