Looking forward to tomorrow’s "Living with Leopards class," check out this great effort by Chitra, this leopard will be displayed proudly tomorrow. Some of the things we will be talking about will be: leopards and trees, the SMS system we are implementing to warn of elephants in the area, and starting our leopard forest.
I’ve mentioned before this is more than a wildlife class, it is really about the young ones developing coexistence strategies as there are only going to be growing challenges ahead. Later, when the program goes into highly affected areas, especially one place where many children have been killed by leopards, we will obviously have a modified presentation. Here in Bardia the kids grow up with wildlife in their faces but in the middle hills, where the leopard is the top predator, it is a different dynamic. The terrain is steep, leopards hide.
In the last few years I’ve read and heard some pretty nasty comments by wildlife activists about people living with wildlife, some of the incidents. One of the worst and most stupid things I hear is “humans are not threatened by extinction, these animals are, blah blah blah”... this is ignorant and achieves nothing, there is no balance to the argument. The people who say these things have never had a child taken by a leopard, one of the most horrific and traumatic things you can imagine. I've had to keep my emotions in check while sitting down with the families involved, their stories are raw and powerful. It is leopards being leopards and people living in fear but we have to modify OUR behaviour to cope.
Coexistence is about balance. If we keep people safe then retaliation is reduced. The jungle is not some wonderful vegan playground, it is a place of life and death. Coexistence strategy is about keeping the latter to a minimum, for all involved…
