Three years earlier, in May 2015, Rampal Saini, a forest guard in Rajasthan’s Ranthambore National Park, was preyed upon, allegedly by a male tiger—locally known as Ustad or the master—whose territory included the area where Saini was killed.

And in Tamil Nadu’s Kanchipuram district, a farmer was bitten by a snake when he was gathering hay for his cattle. For a while, said Gnaneswar Ch, a herpetologist with the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust who questioned the man’s companion, the victim thought he had scratched his hand against a nail. But after about 10 minutes, his companion saw a spectacled cobra nearby. By then, the man had begun to show snakebite symptoms. He was taken to a local faith healer and, when that didn’t work, rushed to a local hospital where he was administered 20 vials of antivenin. The farmer succumbed, just a couple of hours after being admitted.

The three incidents, despite the different species of animals involved (India in 2022 had an estimated 3,682 tigers, about 60-80 million stray dogs and nobody has counted the number of snakes), share one commonality: the reality of human-animal conflict in India.

Apart from tigers, dogs and snakes, 1.4 billion Indians share this land with an estimated 307 million cattle, the only surviving population of Asiatic lions, growing numbers of the Asian elephant and leopards, among other animals.

The US, the world’s third most populous country, has 336 million in an area that is seven times larger.

Conflict Country

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Maharashtra already had 27 leopard attacks by April last year and has since then reported several more, including a leopard that wandered into a film set, one that was seen roaming the streets of Nashik and several attacks on young children. A research paper on leopard-human conflict in the journal People and Nature shows that in Himachal Pradesh’s Hamirpur district, there were 74 instances of attacks on humans between 2004 and 2015. Three of them were fatal. Citing compensation records of the state forest department, it notes there were 239 attacks on livestock between 2010 and 2016. And all of this in a district that has no reserve forests. The leopards of Hamirpur were living in “mixed-use landscapes.”

It isn’t just leopards, although the big cats do feature prominently in any narrative of human- animal conflict in India. They appear in environments as diverse as big cities (Mumbai, Bengaluru) and the villages of Hamirpur.

On 26 December, a tiger walked into a village in Pilibhit, Uttar Pradesh, and rested casually atop a wall, surrounded by hundreds of curious humans who recorded the animal. The resultant video went viral. The cat was captured.

There have also been tiger attacks. Even the herbivorous elephant and gaur have attacked humans. In Shimla, the Himachal Pradesh High Court has asked the state government to do something about the city’s monkey menace.

But it is not just wild animals that are on the rampage. Like in Sitapur district, free-ranging packs of dogs have been implicated in multiple killings. In Kerala, 1,631 dog bites were recorded in one three-day period in July last year. This included a three-year-old who was so badly mauled that her face needed plastic surgery.

That kind of thing is happening elsewhere too. In February, again last year, stray dogs dragged down a four-year-old outside his house in Hyderabad. Visuals of that attack, caught on a neighbourhood CCTV camera, flooded news shows on television.

And then, there are the snakes. A research paper in the journal ELife estimates that roughly 58,000 people die annually of snakebites. Globally, they account for more than 130,000 deaths annually while crocodiles, hippopotamuses, elephants, lions, wolves and sharks put together cause around 2,500 deaths a year.

God and Man

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Nowhere in the world is man, his gods and animals as intertwined as in India. The rooftop macaques of Jaipur who live near temples (made famous by documentaries like Monkey Thieves) and Rajasthan’s famous Karni Mata temple, known for its rats, are examples.

But, perhaps the most popular is Bon Bibi, the forest goddess of the Sunderbans. A landscape where mangrove forests cover the mouths of a mosaic of rivers flowing into the Bay of Bengal, the Sunderbans is famous as an area where wild Bengal tigers prey upon humans who venture into the mangroves to collect honey, beeswax or cut firewood.

Locals who share that landscape with tigers and who enter its territory first pray at shrines dedicated to Bon Bibi. The belief is that the goddess protects those who enter the forest from tigers. The legend of the forest goddess even forms a plot in writer Amitav Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide.

In an article in Scientific American, Vidya Athreya, director of the India chapter of the Wildlife Conservation Society, cites the case of Junnar, a geography in Maharashtra that is home to leopards and people and cattle. Athreya, who was in Junnar in the 2000s for her PhD research, wrote that the region had always had leopards, but the attacks nearly tripled after the government introduced a programme to capture and release the felines in protected national forests.

To illustrate the nonchalance with which locals dealt with leopard encounters, she tells the story of a tug-of-war between an old lady and a leopard that was trying to kill one of her sheep. The leopard, which had grabbed one half of the animal—the lady grabbed the other—gave up and went away, Athreya wrote. In another incident, she recounted annoying a local when she asked about problems due to leopards and then found out that the annoyance was likely due to the fact that the locals worshiped Waghoba—a large cat deity.

There are other beliefs. On a reporting trip to Kerala’s Attappady (which resulted in this story), this writer met the Irula tribals who recounted their long-held belief that when a wild elephant raided one of their fields—a common occurrence in these areas—the yield from the fields destroyed would double the year after.

The tribals also recounted stories of how the crop-raiding elephants would drop grain at the door of poor people as a sort of a gift. Another story involved elephants breaking branches noisily in the forest to signal their presence in that area and indicate to people that they did not want to be disturbed.

At the time, this writer took it to be attempts at casual explanation by people who had to share the landscape with wild elephants. But Athreya’s work, and that of other biologists, make these stories more nuanced. These stories may be helping the tribals deal with the fact that they share their landscape with the animals who they might run into in the course of ordinary jobs.

“India has had a cultural history of shared spaces and we are unique which is why we have so much wildlife,” Athreya told Mint.

The research paper on Hamirpur’s leopards cited earlier shows the nuances of human reactions to potentially dangerous predators in their landscape.

“Interviews revealed that our participants had numerous experiences with leopards and these rarely resulted in human injury or human death, indicating that non‐aggressive human–leopard interactions are more a norm than a rarity in this landscape,” the paper stated.

Trespassing is dangerous

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But why are the animals attacking?

“Our long-term studies clearly show that natural habitats are still critical for survival of leopards and human-leopard co-existence,” said Sanjay Gubbi, wildlife biologist and author of Leopard Diaries: The Rosette In India.

Gubbi uses the example of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park on the outskirts of Mumbai where in 2017, leopards from the national park attacked many people in Aarey Colony.

“Even in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, leopards live inside the park and visit the fringes of Mumbai city for foraging. I wonder if leopards would survive if Sanjay Gandhi National Park is converted to high-rise buildings?” Gubbi asked.

Gubbi is most famous for the role he played in the capture drama of a leopard that was filmed in 2017 by closed circuit cameras walking along a school’s corridors. When the leopard was cornered and trapped the next day, Gubbi found himself in the path of the cornered animal, which attacked. The attack left him with gashes and bites.

“Importantly, this is not unique for Mumbai as projected in the media. Leopards and many other large carnivores live on the fringes of many other cities in India and elsewhere—Bengaluru, Bhopal, Jaipur, Mysuru, New Delhi, Nairobi, Windhoek, and others,” he added.

After Rampal Saini, the forest guard in Ranthambore National Park, was killed, Ustad the tiger was captured and translocated to Udaipur’s Sajjangarh Biological Park.

While villagers appeared relieved— Ustad had allegedly killed four humans in all—activists protested, citing the lack of hard evidence implicating Ustad. All the killings were in the tiger’s territory and not in the villages around the park. There were legal challenges to Ustad’s translocation.

All of this is narrated by filmmaker Warren Pereira in his documentary Tiger 24.

“Pilgrims are allowed to walk through T24’s (Ustad’s) territory on certain days” to visit a Shiva temple, Pereira narrates in the documentary. “The temple is of religious and cultural significance to the villagers and the walk through the forest is a fulfilling ritual for them,” Pereira said in response to emailed questions.

Humans are attacking back

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Media reports, over the years, have chronicled humans avenging animal attacks. The News Minute, in October 2016, reported that people in Thiruvananthapuram went on a “reckless killing spree by beating 27 strays to death” after a 90-year-old man died from a dog attack. And in May 2018, Hindustan Times reported that villagers in Uttar Pradesh’s Sitapur killed eight dogs in retaliation after some strays attacked locals.

“Certainly, sharing space with wildlife that can adversely impact human lives and livelihoods is testing,” said Pranav Chanchani, lead species specialist at WWF-India. “That tigers, elephants and other large mammals have persisted against many odds is testimony to the willingness and ability of people to accommodate wildlife and also the result of decades of conservation. As India advances economically and technologically, the state and its people bear an ever-greater responsibility to sustain biodiversity and maintain the integrity of fragile ecosystems,” he added.

Abi T Vanak, director of the Center for Policy Design and a senior fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, said there were around a 100 dog maulings a year and a further 18,000 fatalities because of rabies.

In the case of dog attacks, it was likely because of increasing human and dog populations, Vanak said, adding that in the case of elephants, habitat loss also contributed.

The story of India’s complicated relationship with its animals can perhaps best be described by the travails of a wild elephant locally known as Arikomban (a portmanteau of the Malayalam words Ari, meaning rice and komban, meaning tusker).

In April 2023, news crews cut into regular programming with visuals from Kerala’s Idukki district, where, according to Malayalam TV channels, an operation was being mounted to catch the elephant.

Television cameras showed foresters preparing for the “operation” as they called it. Yet others tracked the veterinarian mixing the tranquilliser. There were shots of tranquilliser guns being loaded. Four kumkis, as the specially trained domesticated elephants are called in Malayalam, were deployed to manoeuver the darted and drowsy Arikomban to a truck.

The animal was eventually caught, moved away from the area. For some days after, it was tracked by local news channels, which followed its slow return to the forests of its birth. But on the way, it again raided a village in an adjoining state, was captured again and relocated.

Rahul Chandran is working on a book about human-animal and other types of conflict set in Kerala’s Attappadi.