BREAKTHROUGHS
ON a chilly winter morning in January at the Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, four elephants ambled through long grass and bushes amid the light mist covered forest of stately sal trees. The elephants were on a mission that was part of the larger conservation efforts involving the wildlife managers and veterinarians riding on their backs. Soon the elephants came close to a grazing herd of gaur, which they moved gently to a relatively flat and suitable terrain. While doing so they made sure that an adult bull that the managers had singled out had been sufficiently separated from the herd.
The bull was now ready for immobilisation. Once the animal was in clear sight, a dart from a projectile gun found its mark and the animal gradually lost consciousness, staggered and slowly sank down on its haunches. All this while the elephants made sure that the rest of the animals stayed well clear of the bull.
Once complete immobilisation was achieved, the teams got off the elephants, quickly blindfolded the animal to protect its eyes from light, injury and dust, shifted it onto a stretcher and maintained it in a sternal recumbency position (with raised head and folded fore- and hindquarters) to avoid aspiratory pneumonia, gas formation and regurgitation of rumen contents. The veterinarians recorded the animal’s vital health parameters and administered some injections. This was the first of the 50 animals that were reintroduced into the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve some 250 km away, in Umaria district, in 2011-12. This population is now thriving with around 140 animals.
Since the late 1960s Kanha, regarded as one of the best-protected areas in Asia, has been undertaking proactive wildlife management practices such as expanding and improv
ing the protected area with the aim of achieving the larger goal of biodiversity conservation in all its facets. Initially, these proactive practices were measured and purely local. Gradually, however, experience in adaptive management and the knowledge gained from the evolving science of conservation inspired the Kanha management to take up several ambitious undertakings.
BEYOND THE ROUTINE
Speaking generally, except for wildlife protection and rescue operations, most management practices at Kanha are conventional and have almost a fixed time frame for their completion. The management just has to take up these practices at select sites and in the proper seasons as envisaged in the tiger conservation plan as a response or “reaction” to managerial prescriptions. While these tasks are important, their unchanging regularity and dependence on nature makes them monotonous, and eventually, wildlife managers lose their enthusiasm to innovate and achieve higher conservation goals. “Proactive management” in the context of wildlife conservation is the opposite of the “routine” and “reactive” management. This approach looks beyond the routine and anticipates future challenges for timely preparedness. It requires a deep understanding of wildlife ecosystems, animal ecology and behaviour, and threats that may arise in the future.
Proactive measures could range from purely local innovations relevant only to Kanha to rather ambitious projects involving a multidisciplinary team of experts and other protected areas of the region. Local proactive measures may include special species- and habitatspecific and tourism management programmes, and so on. Regional measures, such as species supplementations, reintroductions and animal translocations, involve at least one more protected area in order to complete the donor-receiver scenario. While all these proactive practices are important, handling wild animals for translocation/introduction is the most exciting and newsworthy task in conservation, attracting attention from all quarters.
The conceptualisation and implementation of a proactive intervention entail serious deliberations and planning to achieve goals that may appear to many rather atypical and unconventional. To ensure success, practitioners of proactive management have to step out of their comfort zones to take the risks involved in such unorthodox interventions. Understandably, the approach may also raise questions about the expertise of the practitioners if the desired goal is not achieved or if the achievement does not fare well in a typical cost-benefit analysis. The more ambitious the goal, the higher the risk involved.
The team responsible for a proactive operation involving wild animals is always under pressure, from the media and higher-ups. And, if the