You sip your hot morning tea, enjoying the warmth in your hands, thinking about the long day ahead. The blend is great, the aroma perfect, and the temperature is just right. Have you ever thought about the place your tea came from? There may be a fascinating story of survival involved.
Search for ‘tea plantations’ on the internet, and one will find picturesque rolling hills carpeted with mosaics of near-irridiscent green shrubs. If you ever find yourself standing in the midst of one in southern India, the open sea of green with mist hanging thick in the air comes alive with the chirping of birds and the rhythmic clatter of plantation workers. Every which way you turn, it’s the same visual. Tea, tea and more tea. Quaint and charming, yet strangely monotonous. A rather peculiar animal may yet make its presence visible here: the Asiatic wild dog or ‘dhole’.
The dhole is not as popular as its neighbours — the majestic tiger or the sleek leopard. But it is one of the most endangered carnivores in the world. Dholes are group-living animals on a strict protein diet, relying almost exclusively on the meat of other animals for food (hypercarnivory). We have been trying to unravel the secret lives of these enigmatic dogs for close to a decade now. Dholes usually prefer forest habitats and are shy of people. Their presence in human-altered tea and coffee plantations therefore raises a critical question: how do these elusive social carnivores live alongside people? Our recent study sought to find the answer.
Dholes in Valparai
The Valparai plateau in India’s Western Ghats is a mosaic of tea, coffee, cardamom plantations (agroforests) dotted with rainforest fragments. The plateau stands adjacent to the larger Nilgiris landscape that produces upwards of 70,000 tonnes of tea each year, a portion of which is exported out of India.
The plateau is unique in that it blurs the line between the human world and the wild beyond recognition. The 100 sq.mi plateau, almost an island surrounded by forested Protected Areas, is home to over 70,000 people and their livestock. Living alongside the people is a rich diversity of wild animals that includes leopards, sloth bears, elephants, herbivore ungulates, primates, birds and reptilians.
To understand how dholes use this ‘inter-space’ we first painstakingly walked hundreds of miles looking for indirect signs (tracks and feces). We also set up dozens of cameras with motion-sensors, where animals clicked their own photos upon passing by. This allowed us to map areas that were used (or avoided) by the dhole packs of Valparai.
For a finer, more nuanced picture, we measured microhabitat features in different locations where individual dhole packs were seen resting, moving and hunting. We also collected their feces (scats) to examine what they were eating; specifically, we were keen to find out how much of their diet had wild ungulates versus domestic livestock.
Our expectations were built on years of research in Protected Areas. But our findings revealed a fascinating story of adaptation, which flipped the script. In protected forests, dholes largely occur where their primary prey species are distributed. But in the agroforests, their story was all about people. Their space-use wasn’t limited by wild ungulate prey; instead, their strategy involved choosing flatter areas far away from human settlements.
Dholes also preferred fragmented tree cover (rainforest remnants and eucalyptus plantations), indicating that they remain somewhat forest-dependent, even in human-dominated landscapes. At a finer scale, dhole packs chose microhabitats that offered a strategic trade-off between dense cover (for refuge) and clear sightlines to facilitate vigilance and hunting opportunities.
A look into their diet showed that dholes mostly fed on wild prey species, with sambar deer and gaur topping the menu. This, despite the high availability of domestic livestock in the landscape. A substantial number of samples also had chicken feathers; but from our understanding of the landscape, there were no records of them hunting poultry. Some post-hoc targeted camera-trapping revealed that the poultry was being consumed from inadequately managed open meat-waste dumps.
Dholes have disappeared from >80% of the areas where they once occurred in the last 100 years. Remnant populations are largely confined to the protected forests of South and Southeast Asia. Given this context, their presence and their adaptability to thrive in agroforests offers hitherto untapped conservation potential of these landscapes.
Our findings challenge the conventional notion that conservation strategies need to be focused exclusively within the boundaries of national parks, and that agroforests are just ‘green deserts’ devoid of life. Across South and Southeast Asia, commodity agroforests cover an enormous area; oil palm plantations alone span over 20 million hectares. When combined with expanses of rubber, tea and coffee, these agricultural lands create a substantial working landscape. Since these lands are often located within the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots, they hold immense potential for protecting biodiversity.
But commodity production is profit-driven with land-use decisions by producers and companies influenced by production scale, labour costs, and government interventions. Future changes, as in the case of Valparai’s land-use, driven by growing tourism, new infrastructure, or the intensification of agriculture, could upset this delicate balance.
Considered together, our work demonstrates that human-dominated landscapes, like the agroforests of India’s Western Ghats, can serve as vital ‘coexistence landscapes’ that support both human livelihoods and the needs of wild animals. This does not diminish the importance of legacy Protected Areas; rather, the implication is that we must adopt a forward-thinking approach to conservation, elevating the focus on secondary habitats in our conservation discourse.
So, today on World Dhole Day, as you sit back with a cup of steaming tea, know that there’s a lot more brewing underneath. The survival of one of the world’s most endangered carnivores might just depend on how we manage the very landscapes that produce our daily brew.
Abraham Pious is a former member of The Dhole Project, and currently associated with Ashoka University where he works on Himalayan carnivore ecology. He is broadly interested in behaviour and population ecology, conservation education and outreach.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth