Animals drowning in wells a matter of concern: Data
Since April 15 this year, 11 wild animals have drowned in open wells in Maharashtra. These include two tiger cubs, a family of four sloth bears (with two cubs), a jackal, one blackbuck, a jungle cat, a leopard and a nilgai. Another 33 animals, including 10 wild boar, 16 nilgai, a tiger cub, a rock python and a leopard, were rescued from open wells during the same period, according to data with the forest department, and independent logs maintained by Satpuda Foundation — a wildlife conservation group.
All incidents, barring two leopards in Pune’s Junnar taluka, occurred in agricultural fields in Vidarbha, within or close to buffer areas around tiger reserves. Earlier, in January 2021, a gaur (Indian bison) in Mahabaleshwar was rescued from a 50-foot-deep well. In November last year, a striped hyena had been rescued by a volunteer group from an uncovered well in Ane near Otur, Junnar.
A simple fix?
Experts and activists expressed concern at the frequency of such incidents. These may not pose a significant conservation risk, but are easily preventable with little logistical support.
“A few leopards or bears drowning in wells every year is not going to make a huge dent in their overall population. Human beings kill wild animals in larger numbers through various other means. But in this case, the solution is apparently quite simple — you just have to cover the well,” said Dr Aniruddha Belsare, a wildlife veterinarian, conservation researcher and disease ecologist who has previously studied human-leopard conflict in Maharashtra. Another “no-cost band-aid” solution, he said, would be providing “jugaad ladders” in these open wells that animals can use to get out.
And yet, animals have been dying in this manner for decades, exclaimed Bandu Dhotre, a Chandrapur-based wildlife activist and non-government member of the State Board for Wildlife (SBWL). Satpuda Foundation, for example, has scattered records of bears, deer, nilgai, leopards and tigers drowning in irrigation canals and tube-wells going back to 2011.
In 2012, when Dhotre had staged a hunger strike in front of the forest department’s district headquarters for better protection of tigers around protected areas in Vidarbha, one of his demands was that open wells in buffer areas be covered.
“This has been done at a lot of places around Tadoba Tiger Reserve where the wells are now covered with wire mesh or fenced. But we’ve started seeing such accidents in places where they were not happening earlier,” said Dhotre, referring to the recent casualties.
While Dhotre speculated that wild animals in these areas may be expanding their ranges, leading them to agricultural fields and eventually to uncovered wells, experts cautioned against accepting this hypothesis without further study.
Nevertheless, activists, experts and even officials agreed that such deaths are likely being grossly underreported. “We only hear about it when a large or exotic animal dies in this manner in areas where the forest department is active. But you cannot track every casualty. There are still remote places, and animals that are not glamorous enough, that we may never see the full scale of the problem,” said Kishor Rithe, head of Satpuda Foundation and a non-government member of SBWL.
Prolonged distress
Though experts, particularly wildlife veterinarians, cautioned against anthropomorphising these accidents, they conceded that most animals that drown in wells are sure to have experienced painful and prolonged deaths. A veterinarian who has conducted dozens of post-mortems for such cases said he first looks to an animal’s claws for such indications.
“One of the first things I check is nails. I’ve seen leopards and bears where the animal has struggled so much, trying to grab onto something, that their sharp nails become extremely blunt. It really gives you a sense of how much the animal has struggled,” said Dr Nikhil Bangar, veterinarian at the Mandikoh Leopard Rehabilitation Centre in Junnar.
Even Belsare, who was more reluctant to use words like pain and suffering in this context, said, “Most wild animals are great swimmers. They will do all they can to stay afloat, before they develop hypothermia, fatigue and other medical conditions leading to drowning. These deaths are not instant, or easy, and often involve prolonged stress”
Though forest department officials did not share post-mortem reports of the 11 casualties referred to at the outset of this report (citing confidentiality), the cause of death in all cases has been attributed to drowning, they confirmed.
This is done on the basis of a simple forensic test, in which a small piece of lung tissue is set in a glass of water. “If the tissue floats, the animal did not drown. It may have been poisoned, poached and then thrown into the well, opening up another line of investigation. But if the lung sinks, it means the animal did indeed drown,” Dr Belsare said. But, he also emphasised that the process of drowning itself is not as simple as the test which confirms it. There is, in fact, a more complex sequence of events that eventually culminates in death for the animal.
HT also spoke to a wildlife veterinarian currently employed with the forest department at a tiger reserve in Vidarbha who has conducted post-mortems in such cases for all manner of wildlife, including leopards, subadult tigers, bears and deer. “In case of drowning, we do not typically ask questions beyond lung test. It is time consuming and we need specialised vets to conduct post-mortems and interpret the data. The drowning conclusion may be reductive, but further investigation is not encouraged.”
The animal’s ordeal
From a coroner’s perspective, one of the first physiological responses an animal might experience in such a case is hypothermia, followed by exhaustion. “There could be a drop in body temperature due to the water, and as the animal struggles to stay afloat there will be a build-up of lactic acid in the muscles. Eventually the airway will become submerged as fatigue sets in. Water will enter the lungs, causing air-hunger, leading to asphyxiation,” said Dr Naveen Pandey, wildlife veterinarian with Corbett Foundation.
Metabolic changes that occur during drowning may also cause cardiac arrhythmias or cardiac arrest.
“Sometimes, in case of more delicate animals like deer, the creature may even die before asphyxiation. In this case we look for certain lesions on the heart called Petechial haemarroaghes, which broadly indicate cardiac arrest,” said Pandey.
A drowning animal may develop a range of other conditions in combination with one another, from aspiration pneumonia which is caused by entry of oral or gastric contents into the lungs, to pulmonary edemas where air sacs in the lungs fill up with fluid, explained wildlife veterinarians.
Experts described five broad stages of this process. “During the first phase, muscles get overworked. In the second, animals may experience laryngospasms, where trachea involuntarily closes. As the animal struggles to breathe, respiratory acidosis occurs when the body is not able to remove carbon dioxide due to a lack of oxygen. This leads to unconsciousness, and allows water to enter the lungs and airways, making them bulky and distended. Lungs get inflammation, leading to pneumonia-like conditions and pulmonary edemas,” said Dr Bangar.
Eventually, the lack of oxygen leads to irreversible brain damage, putting the animal in a coma. “No longer able to struggle or see, the animal drowns. But as I’ve said, there is a lot that happens before that final moment of death,” he added.
A 2016 paper in the peer-reviewed journal Veterinary Pathology describes the process as such: “The drowning process is complex, involving sequential, concurrent and overlapping cardiorespiratory reflexes, electrolyte and blood gas abnormalities, aspiration and swallowing of liquid, vomition, struggling, involuntary movements and physical exhaustion, breathlessness, or air-hunger, eventually culminating in death.”
Need administrative will
Since 2011, there have been at least three general resolutions (GR) passed at the state level pertaining to joint forest management practices in wildlife dense areas which have recommended that wildlife-proofing of wells be expedited in protected and non-protected areas. The latest of these was passed by the forest department under Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherji Jan Van Vikas Yojana in August 2015.
“According to these GRS, zilla parishads are tasked with the responsibility of covering open wells. An amendment to the last GR in 2017 even devolved powers to the forest department to take up the issue, but the administration has been extremely slow on the uptake. Meanwhile, animals continue to drown, and we simply write them off with obligatory post-mortems,” said Rithe.
Responding to these concerns, Nitin Kakodkar, principal chief conservator of forests (Maharashtra), drew attention to various administrative challenges faced by the department.
The main issue, he said, is that these wells are located outside the boundaries of protected areas, where the forest department has no administrative jurisdiction.
“Many of these wells are built under various government schemes, which do not have strict mandates for protection of wildlife. But we are making efforts to plug the gaps. We regularly raise the issue with zila parishads. In Bhandara, where two tiger cubs drowned in a siphon well this month, we have identified 32 such wells and temporarily covered 28 of them. The irrigation department has been instructed to find a permanent solution,” said Kakodkar. MUMBAI: